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The Simurgh floated in the air, remaining in a kind of stasis, much like she’d been in when we’d approached her, but there was an entire rig of devices surrounding her. A halo, almost, studded with guns and cannons at regular intervals. The sky behind her was overcast, clouds rolling past us with the strong winds, and mingled dust and smoke slowly shifting beneath her, brown-gray. The juxtaposition was eerie, the clouds of the sky moving faster than the smoke and dust, and the Simurgh between the two, utterly still.

On TV, back in the days when we’d had television, there had been the various talk shows, news segments and interviews where the Endbringers would come up. I’d listened, even though television wasn’t really my thing. I’d heard people theorize on the Simurgh’s scream, wondering out loud about just how many of the disasters that followed in her wake were her, and how many were our own overblown paranoia.

It helped to remind myself that I wasn’t the only one who was debating the possibilities. I’d listened for too long. Was I tainted? If this was all a trap, then I might already be seeded with some destructive or disastrous impulse. Should I be hypervigilant? Should I not stress over it?

It was a debate millions of individuals had maintained amongst themselves, in the wake of the Simurgh’s attacks. Invariably, there wasn’t a right answer. If she wanted to fuck with me, there wasn’t anything I could do. Anything could and would fit into her game plan.

It wasn’t just me, either. I was very aware of Lung’s presence, and of Shadow Stalker’s.

The Yàngbǎn were dealt with. There were two major raiding parties, if we judged solely by the colors of their masks, and three or four other sub-groups tasked with different functions. One raiding party was annihilated, and I could hope the Endbringer’s presence would scare off the other group.

There was an upside of sorts, in that the Yàngbǎn didn’t have access to Cauldron’s doormaking parahuman. It meant they moved exclusively through the portals that dotted Earth Bet, the same portals the refugees had used, which some stragglers were still using. Various factions and governments were gathering small armies at each of the remaining portals. One Earth was already lost to us, destroyed by Scion in the first day he’d been traveling universes. The South American refugees who had fled through there would be either eradicated or reduced to such a small population that it barely mattered. Earth Zayin, too, was gone, subsumed by the Sleeper.

Still, a dozen Earths remained, with people scattered all over them. The C.U.I. had claimed one, and they’d be ready for retaliation, maintaining a defensive line.

I doubted that defensive line would hold if an Endbringer decided to march through. No, they would be gathering their forces in anticipation of a possible attack. Good.

I took in my surroundings. One ramshackle settlement, more than half of it obliterated by bombs. Relatively little in the way of collateral damage on the Simurgh’s part.

Psychological damage? Quite possible. The Simurgh was a terror weapon, her very presence enough to rout armies, and these refugees weren’t an army. Morale had been low to start with.

I sighed. We’d scared people off, and they’d fled to the hills, quite literally. In a movie, this would have been the moment that people slowly began returning, the orchestral music swelling as they overcame their fear.

Ridiculous, in context. They’d hide for days, and they’d flee the second they saw the Simurgh again.

This wasn’t a case where we’d be able to stop the imminent threat and then recruit a select few people from among the survivors.

“Yo,” Tattletale said. She had to run to get up the last stretch of the little hill that overlooked Tav’s primary settlement.

“Yo,” I responded.

“Total deadpan? You can be a little excited,” she said.

“I am. Quiet terror is a kind of excitement, isn’t it? Pulse pounding, heart in my throat, and I’m so tense I’m getting a headache, because I’m almost afraid to think.”

“You think I’m not? Fuck. There’s very few things that genuinely terrify me. One of them is hanging out right above us, building something, and I can’t even read her, which makes her one of the few things out there that surprise me.”

Building something? I looked up.

True enough, the Simurgh had her hands in front of her, and was manipulating debris in between her hands.

“Ship shape, but Defiant’s wanting to be careful. He’s demanding they get triple-checked. Kind of funny, seeing that from him.”

I shrugged. It would be a bigger leap for Tattletale to see the changes in him than for me to see it. I’d been acquainted with him over the past two years, while she only saw him here and there.

“They’ll be up for it if we have a fight?” I asked.

Tattletale shrugged. “For sure. Scratches, bruises, but that’s about it. We’re down to fight at a moment’s notice. Sad thing is, the worst thing Scion could do to us is wait a month or two before he comes back.”

“True,” I agreed.

Not a pleasant thought. If he took a leave of absence while we were trying to wrangle the Endbringers, odds were we’d get taken out by other factions or by the Endbringers themselves.

“I dunno,” Imp said. I managed to not be startled as she appeared. “Killing us all is pretty awful.”

“Awful, but not awful in the ‘let humanity destroy itself’ sort of way,” I pointed out. “Let us come up with a plan for fighting back, then disappearing? Letting that plan fester and fuck us over?”

Imp shrugged. “So? What do we do?”

“Handle what we can,” I said. “Let’s go talk to the others and hash out a plan of action.”

The three of us made our way down the hill to the settlement. In the doing, we passed through a darker patch where the Simurgh’s wingspan blocked out a portion of the sun. What little sunlight could pass through the cloud cover, anyways. I glanced up and saw her in shadow, the light behind her outlining her body, hair, feathers and the halo of improvised weapons.

Defiant had his helmet off. His hair had grown in just a little, but wasn’t much more than a buzz cut, stubble on one side of his face was much the same. But for the lack of stubble on his cheek, I might not have noticed his face was partially a prosthetic. A gift from the Nine.

“It worked,” he said.

“More or less,” I responded. “One civilian death and seven civilian injuries in the fighting, the death and two of the injuries were the Simurgh’s fault.”

“Only that many,” Defiant said.

“She was letting us know she could,” Tattletale said. “Which is something we really should pay attention to, so long as we’re trying to make sense of Endbringer psychology. I’m wondering if you could say that they’re primarily a warped super-ego, devoid of any real ego or advanced id. Built in codes and rulesets, not human social rules, but still rules established by a creator.”

“Sigmund Freud,” Defiant said. “I remember being back in University. Second year psychology elective. The professor said one word, ‘Freud‘, and the entire auditorium of students exploded in laughter.”

Tattletale smiled. “You’re calling my analysis into question?”

“If you’re basing it on the Freudian structural model, yes.”

“Freud was big on the whole Oedipus, Electra thing. Mommy issues, daddy issues. I’d say if we have any understanding of the Endbringers at all, there’s definitely something going on there. Not sexual, but you get what I mean.”

“You’re way overstating my intelligence,” Imp said. “I don’t get what you mean at all.”

“The Endbringers have a fucked up connection with whoever made them,” I said. “Be it Eidolon or someone else.”

“I understand that.”

“So if they’re unmoored from whatever’s anchoring them to reality,” Tattletale said, “What’s motivating them now?”

“A better question,” I said, “Is… well, who the fuck is she following?”

“Us,” Imp said. “You guys are overthinking this.”

I sighed. “She is following us, probably. Leviathan was following the Azazel, Simurgh followed the Dragonfly. Both maintained consistent speeds, matching pace, keeping a short distance. What I’m asking is, which of us, exactly, does the Simurgh follow?”

“Who’s in control of her, for the time being?” Tattletale summed up the question.

“There’s an easy way to check that,” Defiant murmured. Odd, that his voice had a vaguely mechanical twang to it even with his helmet off. “Each person that was on the Dragonfly walks in a different direction, and we see who she follows.”

I frowned, glancing skyward for a moment. No sign of any movement or response from the Simurgh.

“What?” Tattletale asked.

“I wouldn’t say anyone’s in control of her,” I said. “Because I don’t think anyone is in control of her except her, and-”

I stopped there.

“What?” Tattletale asked, again.

“When she was first attacking the settlement and I was musing aloud at the possibility of betrayal, she very deliberately looked at me. It was a communication, all on its lonesome. Letting me know the whole betrayal thing was a possibility, that she had some self-volition, and letting me know she was listening.”

“I know,” I said. “But I’m not just saying she heard me. I’m saying she was listening. She’s hearing every word we say here and she’s paying attention to all of it, processing it, applying it, maybe.”

“You may be reading too much into a momentary eye contact,” Defiant said. “I’m watching the video footage in question right now… yes. I see what you’re talking about.”

“Right?” I asked. “So you agree?”

But he shook his head. “I suspect It’s a bad sign if you’re getting paranoid over this. It’s counterproductive, and the moment your fear or second-guessing is detrimental enough, you need to step down and walk away.”

I took a deep breath, then sighed. “I’m fine.”

“If there’s an issue…”

“No issue. All I’m saying, the only reason I brought this up, is because I don’t want to get on her bad side. I’d very much appreciate it if we treated her with due respect. Let’s not upset her by talking about her in a negative light. Electra complexes, talking about who’s controlling her, or experimenting on her. I don’t think it’s that easy to understand her, and we’re only going to upset her if we keep going down that road.”

“She doesn’t get upset,” Defiant said. “Didn’t we just spend an inordinate amount of time talking about how Endbringers don’t have conventional emotions?”

“We’re all mentally exhausted,” I said. I glanced up at the Simurgh. “Keep that in mind.”

There were nods all around.

“The Pendragon won’t fly until I fix it,” Defiant said, standing. He pulled on his helmet, and there was an audible sound as it locked into place. “I’ll need parts from elsewhere. It also means leaving some people behind. You can’t fit everyone into the Dragonfly.”

“We’ll do something low-risk in the meantime, then,” I said. “Reduced group.”

“Sensible. I’ll go see after the others, then. This would be a good time to eat, stock up on supplies or use the facilities.”

Defiant wasn’t one for goodbyes or formalities. He said he’d leave, and he left, his boots making heavy sounds with each footfall.

“Well, I’m going to go make water,” Tattletale said, jerking a thumb towards one of the outhouses. “I’d be all girl-code and invite you with, but I actually like you guys, and I don’t want to subject you to that atmosphere.”

“Thanks,” I said.

When Tattletale had disappeared, Imp and I sort of meandered over towards the others.

Canary was closest, helmet off, her hair plastered to her head with sweat, making her feathers that much more prominent where they stuck out of her hairline.

“This is crazy,” she said.

“This is a Tuesday for us,” Imp replied, overly casual in a way that was almost forced.

Imp held her mask in one hand, using it to nudge Canary twice, then tipping it to the side as she winked, keeping time with the four words.

Canary’s eyes went wide. “Oh. Oh!”

“Dudette, with all the hugging and reassuring they were doing, how was this even in question?”

“I don’t follow the cape scene. I don’t know how close teammates get. I just figured, shitty situation, life and death, maybe you cling tighter to any buoy in a storm… oh god. I asked if I could come with them.”

Imp nodded sagely. “I can see where you’d get confused. We’re very close, here, after all.”

Canary was blushing, humiliated, the pink of her skin contrasting her yellow hair.

Imp continued, “After all, Skitter… Weaver and I… well…”

She tried to make bedroom eyes at me, holding her hands in front of her, twisting her arms as she drew her shoulders forward, the very picture of a lovestruck schoolgirl.

Canary’s face reddened further as Imp continued to poke fun.

Imp, for her part, gave it up after only two or three seconds. “Fuck. Can’t do it. Weaver here has diddled my brother, and it just feels squick and incestuous.”

“That’s the reason we haven’t ever done the relationship thing,” I said, my voice flat. “It’d be weird in an almost incestuous way.”

Imp cackled. One of very few people I knew who could cackle. She was enjoying herself. This was her medium. One of them. “You’d do better with Tattletale, or Rachel.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I injected a little more sarcasm into my voice, “for the mental pictures that evokes.”

She cackled again.

Eager to change the topic, I glanced at the others. The Wards were sitting a short distance away, Kid Win, Golem, Vista and Cuff, sitting together. Cuff was fixing up Golem’s costume.

I’d feel weird about approaching them. Technically, I was still a Ward, though my eighteenth birthday had come and gone. I should have moved up to the Protectorate, but I’d never been sworn in, had never filled in the paperwork.

The Slaughterhouse Nine, Scion and the mass-evacuation from Earth Bet sort of gave me an excuse, but I still didn’t want to face the questions.

I glanced at Saint, who was sitting between Narwhal and Miss Militia. They were pretty clearly talking guns.

Lung stood alone. He was holding a skewer with meat all along the length. A glance around didn’t show any possible source.

A check with my swarm did. A few hundred feet away, there was a cooking fire that had gone out in the aftermath of the Yàngbǎn attack. Lung had apparently claimed some food as a matter of course.

“Lung,” I said, almost absently.

“You know him?” Canary asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“He was kind of notorious in the Birdcage. A lot of people, they come in, and they do something to make a statement. Kill someone, pick someone suitable and claim them, challenge someone suitably impressive to a fight, that sort of thing.”

“What did Lung do?” I asked.

“He marched into the women’s side of the prison, killed his underling, and then killed and maimed a bunch of others before the cell block leaders ordered people to pull back. I got called into a meeting, too, where a bunch of people in charge of cell blocks asked me to come and tell them what I knew about him, since we arrived at the same time.”

I nodded. “But you didn’t know anything.”

“No. I think some of them were really worried, too. I thought they were going to hurt me, until Lustrum, uh, my cell block leader, backed me up, gave me her protection.”

“Geez,” Imp said. “That’s messed up.”

Canary shrugged. “How did you put it? A Tuesday? A Tuesday in the Birdcage.”

“No, I’m not talking about that,” Imp said. “I’m talking about the fact that Lustrum the feminazi was in charge of your cell block and you still didn’t pick up on the thing between Parian and Foil. Isn’t that, like, Sappho central?”

Sappho?

Canary blushed again. “I… uh.”

“I mean, seriously,” Imp said.

“Ease up,” I warned her.

“I… I live and let live,” Canary said. “I just didn’t want to step on toes.”

“And you never got any?”

“I had somebody, but like I said…”

They were still going as I focused on my swarm. I gave some commands to the Dragonfly, which I had landed a mile and a half out of town, and brought it our way.

With the relay bugs, I could sense most of the settlement, the surrounding landscape, everything above and below. That was only using half of them.

The remainder were fertilized, bearing eggs.

I’d flipped the switches, shifted them into breeding mode, and I was working on keeping them warm and well fed. I’d have to wait until the eggs hatched before I found out whether the young had any range extension ability. If I had to wait until they were adult, well, the world might end before I got that far.

Defiant was returning. I stepped away from Canary and Imp to greet him.

“Let’s go,” he said.

■

Smaller team, while the Pendragon was out of action, smaller job.

The ones who were grounded would be looking after the settlement, ensuring the survivors were able to make it through the next few nights.

Tattletale was with me. Imp and Rachel had come with for much the same reason Lung had. They were restless personalities, unwilling to relax when there was a possibility of a conflict. I wanted to think that Rachel’s intentions were a little kinder in nature than Lung’s, that she wanted to protect her friends, but I wasn’t going to ask, nor was I going to set any hopes on it.

A pleasant idea, nothing more.

Lung was eerily quiet. He’d acted to stop Shadow Stalker from attacking me, but he hadn’t shown a glimmer of his power.

After we’d decided who went where, before we’d left, Canary had found a moment to talk to me. To finish what she’d been about to say when Imp had interrupted to poke fun at her.

Information about Lung.

He coasted on reputation for some time. Didn’t use his power, didn’t fight, just intimidated. Nobody was willing to start something because nobody really knew what he was about. Until this guy from Brockton Bay came in. Had some info. Except, by then, Lung was entrenched in Marquis’ cell block, and even if someone wanted to go after him, they didn’t want to deal with Marquis in the process.

Lung hadn’t been using his power. Why? Was there a reason?

A deep seated concern about his passenger, maybe? No. What would excuse that?

I needed to ask Tattletale, now that I knew, but there hadn’t been a moment where we’d both been alone.

We had Shadow Stalker, who had no interest in rebuilding and resettling. Defiant was with us as well, relying on remote monitoring to perform the occasional check-in on Saint. Narwhal would manage the rest.

Miss Militia had come along, and nobody had said anything to mark it as fact, but I got the distinct impression it was for Defiant‘s sake.

And, of course, we had the Simurgh. Following. She’d finished building what she’d been working on as she hovered over the aftermath of the fight at the Tav settlement.

A shortsword, four feet long, without any guard to protect the hand from an enemy’s weapon, both sides of the blade serrated. Black.

Defiant had called it a Gladius.

Defiant had the cockpit and Miss Militia’s company, and so I was left to hang out in the cabin, with Rachel sleeping beside me, Bastard and Huntress sleeping at her feet.

I admired her ability to rest in such stressful situations. I glanced at Shadow Stalker, who seemed to be filled with nervous energy. When we’d kidnapped her for Regent to control, Rachel had been able to sleep then, too.

I felt like I had to be responsible, somehow. I’d taken on three very dangerous individuals, with reputations ranging from bloodthirsty vigilante to Endbringer, and I knew I’d blame myself if something went wrong on any count. I couldn’t sleep when there was information to take in, when there were people to watch, people to watch over, and personalities to keep in check.

Threats and conflicts, within and without.

Many of the monitors were focused on Bohu, the towering Endbringer, tall enough that her heads reached the cloud cover. Five miles tall, give or take. Gaunt, expressionless, without legs to walk with. No, she moved like a block of stone that someone was pushing, not with lurching movements, but a steady, grinding progression that left bulldozed terrain in her wake. Overlapping rings marked the area she traveled as well, as she continued switching between her typical combat-mode cycles, altering the terrain, raising walls, creating traps and deadfalls, generating architecture.

The monitors abruptly changed. One shaky image, from one cameraman at just the right vantage point.

A golden streak crossing the evening sky, appearing out of nowhere.

Just about everyone in the Dragonfly tensed. I felt myself draw in a breath, my meager chest swelling as if I could draw in confidence as well as air, preparing to give orders, to provide the call to arms.

But the golden light disappeared as soon as it had appeared. Like the jet stream of an aircraft passing overhead, except it was light, not smoke, and it only marked a brief period where he’d passed through our world on his way to other things.

We relaxed.

Rachel hadn’t even woken up. She was exhausted, though we’d barely participated in any fighting.

The Dragonfly moved closer to the ground as we approached the next portal. It was squatter, broader, allowing for more ground traffic at a moment’s notice, though it made the passage of flying vehicles more difficult.

Like Scion, exiting one world, passing through Bet on our way to the next. It reminded me of my discussion with Panacea. People who build and people who destroy. We were trying to do the former, Scion the latter.

The Dragonfly passed through the portal.

Heavy rain showered down around us. The Dragonfly faltered for an instant as it changed settings, very nearly nosediving into the ground beneath us.

Defiant pulled the craft up.

Agnes Court, I thought. I’d studied all of the major players in anticipation of the end of the world, I knew who the Elite were, and I knew who had built this.

She fit somewhere between Labyrinth and the Yàngbǎn’s Ziggurat. Organically grown structures. Seeds that swelled into pillars, stairs, houses and bigger things, given enough time in proximity to their master. The wood-like substance hardened to stone of varying colors after she terminated the growth.

In the span of two and a half days, she’d grown a walled city, one with an elaborate castle at the northmost end, with shelters and what looked like a sewer system, if I was judging the perfectly round hole in the cliff face below right. It was gushing water.

Two days to make this.

Leviathan had taken less than an hour to demolish it.

The wall, taller than some skyscrapers, was shattered in three places, damaged enough to serve little purpose in others. A shallow river flowed through the spots where the damage to the wall reached the ground.

Leviathan had perched himself atop the castle’s highest tower, though the tower wasn’t broad enough for him to put anything more than two clawed hands and two feet on the very top. His tail wound around the structure, in one window and out another.

Even through the rain, his five eyes glowed.

“Oh no,” I said. “The civilians. The refugees.”

“Relatively few,” Tattletale said. “That’s… yeah. I don’t think we offed people in any substantial numbers.”

In any substantial numbers, I thought.

“I didn’t think they’d get this kind of structure up in time,” I said.

“Court grows things exponentially, given time,” Tattletale said.

She frowned.

“Grew things exponentially.”

If that was the case, then we’d lost a possible asset. Fuck this, fuck the Elite for bringing things to this point.

“There were a thousand people here,” Defiant said. “Many who were managing supplies and resources for the rebuilding and resettlement efforts.”

“I’d explain,” Tattletale said, “But I’d rather not explain twice.”

“Twice?” Miss Militia asked.

Tattletale pointed.

The Azazel had parked on top of a tower at the wall’s edge, almost opposite to where Leviathan was. A crowd had gathered around it.

Too many to be just the Dragon’s Teeth. Far too many.

I swallowed.

Cameras zoomed in on the individuals. Hard to make out through the rain, but I could draw the appropriate conclusions.

The Dragonfly landed, far gentler in the process than I would have managed on my own.

“Time to face the music,” Tattletale said.

I took the time to restructure my costume, raising my hood to protect my head before I stepped out into the pouring rain. Defiant was in step to my right, Tattletale to my left.

No, not pouring. Pounding. As heavy a rainfall as I’d ever experienced.

The other major players had arrived. The Thanda, Faultline, the Irregulars, the Meisters, the remnants of the Suits… Cauldron.

It took time for everyone from the Dragonfly to make their way outside. We looked so small in comparison to the group arrayed before us. People had disappeared here and there. Dead or gone in the wake of the disaster on the oil rig, or the fighting that had followed.

Even after we’d arrived, after the ramp had closed, the group before us remained utterly silent. There was only the sound of the rain, so deafening I might have been unable to hear people if they’d shouted. I clenched my fists, tried not to shiver. If I started, I wouldn’t stop. Staying calm, staying confident, my attention on my bugs as a way of escaping the stresses here… it made for an almost zen moment.

It was in that same moment that the Simurgh descended.

Descended was the wrong word. She fell. It was as though she’d stopped lifting herself into the air, and let herself drop. Her wings moved to control her descent, keep her facing towards the ground as she plummeted. In the gloom of the rain and the heavy stormclouds above, her silver-white body was the easiest thing to make out. If the assembled capes hadn’t already been keeping a wary eye on her, the movement would have turned heads anyways.

A white streak, plummeting from the sky, striking Leviathan.

The shockwave that accompanied the impact tore through the tower. Superficial features broke away first, followed by the internal structures that had provided structural integrity. The end result was a gradual, almost slow-motion collapse, a lingering view of the Simurgh and Leviathan as they’d been at the moment of impact.

They tilted as the tower did, but neither Endbringer moved. The Simurgh had both feet pressed against Leviathan’s stomach, one hand reaching up to grip his face, the other hand holding the gladius she’d made, buried so deep in Leviathan’s sternum that only a little bit of the handle stuck out.

Pieces of her halo began to fall, including her fabricated guns and the other debris she’d arranged to form the ring itself. It rained down like a localized meteor shower, striking the castle, the base of the tower, the wall, and Leviathan.

The Simurgh managed to avoid being struck, even with her vast wingspan. She leaped up, kicking herself off of Leviathan, and found a perch on the wall, folding her wings around herself and the top of the wall, as if to ward off the worst of the rain.

Maybe six or seven seconds later, the tower finished collapsing, and Leviathan’s massive, dense body hit ground, crashing through several buildings before settling, the handle of the sword still sticking out of the wound.

He didn’t rise. He twitched, lashed out with his tail, dashing three already tattered buildings to smithereens, then gushed with water, producing four or five times his body weight in water without even moving.

Death throes?

She’d hit his core.

Beside me, Imp wiped at the lenses of her mask, tried again, and then pulled it off entirely. She stared at the scene with her mouth agape, then looked to Tattletale, mouthing three words in a voice too quiet to make out through the pounding rain.

Tattletale’s hair was soaked through, streaming with rivulets of water that ran down her back. Dark makeup ran from the eye sockets of her costume.

However bedraggled she appeared, just after a minute of standing in the rain, she also looked contemplative, rubbing her chin as she hugged her other arm close for warmth.

Leviathan went utterly still.

I watched the faces of the others. Every set of eyes was fixed on Leviathan’s body. Nobody seemed like they were willing or able to tear their eyes away from the scene.

Slowly, almost at a glacial pace, Leviathan moved. One hand with the disproportionately long claws was planted on the ground, then another. His tail provided some of the support and strength to leverage himself to his feet.

That, oddly enough, seemed to surprise Tattletale. Her hand dropped from her face to her side. She fumbled to hook her thumb over her belt as if she needed the extra leverage.

When Leviathan had pulled himself to an upright position with both feet beneath him, his head hanging down, the tail snaked around the handle of the sword.

He wrenched it free, and tore out chunks of his own chest in the process. There was little left but the handle and the base of the sword. Needle-like lengths of metal speared out from the base, but the bulk of the sword’s material was gone.

Leviathan continued to move with an almost excruciating slowness as he reached out with his claws, extending each arm to his sides, like a figure crucified.

The wound was superficial, but he was acting like he’d received a more grievous wound than any of us had dealt in the past.

The wind turned, and the wall ceased to provide a curtain against the rain. For a moment, Leviathan was only a silhouette.

I could see his shape distort.

Others reacted before I saw anything different. The Number Man, Tattletale, Dinah, Faultline… they saw something I couldn’t make out through the curtains of torrential rain. The Number Man said something to Doctor Mother, and I saw Dinah fall back just an instant before Faultline gave a hand signal to her crew. They adopted fighting stances.

Did they really think we could fight, if it came down to it? Against two Endbringers?

It was maybe twenty seconds of stillness, seeing only vague shapes through the shifting downpour, before the wind turned again. I got a glimpse of what the Simurgh had done.

I could hear a squeak from beside me. I expected it to be Imp, saw it was Shadow Stalker, instead. She clutched her crossbow in both hands.

Fins. Leviathan had fins.

They were like blades, points sweeping backwards. A fin rooted in the side of his arm, from wrist to elbow, the point scything back. Had it not been limp enough to trail on the ground, it might have reached his shoulder. More at the sides of his neck and along the length of his spine, forming an almost serrated pattern where multiple fins overlapped. Perhaps some at his legs. The fins ran down the length of his tail, and ended in a cluster at the end, like the tuft of fur at the end of a lion’s tail, exaggerated many times over in size.

He flexed a claw, and I could see webbing between each finger, mottled in black and an iridescent green that matched his eyes. It made me think of the bioluminescence of a jellyfish in the deep ocean.

In synchronous motions, the Simurgh unfurled her wings, stretching them to their full length, and Leviathan flexed his fins, letting them unfold in kind. Each fin was the same as the webbing, mottled black and a eerie green, and the echo-image of water that accompanied his movement produced mist as it washed over the fins. It obscured him almost completely, and as much as the pouring rain served to drive it away, the rainwater produced more mist as it touched the fins.

It took some time to clear, and even then, it only cleared because Leviathan had folded the fins up again. When we could see Leviathan again, he had collapsed into a sitting position, one overlong arm draped over his legs, ‘chin’ resting on one shoulder, completely at ease.

Above him, the Simurgh slowly folded her wings closed, like a reversal of a flower blossoming.

Doctor Mother turned to face us.

“Wha- The-” she stuttered.

Contessa, holding an umbrella to keep the both of them dry, set an arm on the Doctor’s shoulder. The Doctor fell silent, stopping only to look at Leviathan, then turned back to Tattletale.

Tattletale managed a grin. “I’d say there’s a silver lining in all this, but that phrase has sort of lost it’s cachet over the last decade or so.”

She gestured in the vague direction of the Simurgh before hugging her arms against her body. “…He’s probably stronger, which helps if he’s going up against Scion, right?”

“I think,” Doctor Mother said. She paused very deliberately. “It would be very wise to keep the Endbringers separatedfrom here on out.”

“We might have to fight them, before or after we take on Scion,” King of Swords, leader of one division of the Suits voiced the concerns that everyone was harboring.

Lung was the next one to speak. “What did she do?”

“Upgraded Leviathan,” Tattletale said. “Attuned some device to the right frequency or setting, then tapped into his core without doing too much harm to Leviathan. Fed things into there. Knowledge, data, nanotechnology.”

Defiant’s head turned, as if Tattletale had said something.

“Yeah,” Tattletale said. “Nanotech. Why do you think the fins were turning water to mist?”

“My tech?” Defiant asked.

“Among one or two other advancements. If the density rules are in effect, I’d bet those fins are just as hard to cut through as Leviathan’s arm or torso. Disintegration effect, maybe something else.”

“I hope you can understand why we’re… distressed with you,” the Doctor said.

“Fuck you,” Tattletale retorted. “Cope.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. She didn’t relent, nor did she release any of her tension.

“You wiped out two defending forces,” the Doctor said. “We lost the Yàngbǎn’s support when you took out their infiltration squads, and the Elite are wiped out.”

I squeezed Tattletale’s shoulder. She gave me an annoyed look, but she backed away.

I took in a deep breath. I could see the Doctor fold her arms. Like a mother or schoolteacher awaiting an apology from the recalcitrant student.

“Fuck you,” I said.

“You don’t want us for enemies,” the Doctor said.

“We have the fucking Simu-” Imp started. Tattletale elbowed her.

“The Yàngbǎn were doing more harm than good,” I said.

“They were limiting their strikes to civilians. Not something I agree with, but with Earth, with every Earth on the line, I’d forego two or three thousand lives for the help of over two hundred of the C.U.I.’s trained parahumans.”

“They’d given up,” Tattletale said. “They were taking territory to run and hide.”

“Contessa would have changed their minds.”

Tattletale shrugged. “Don’t blame us for not taking your plans into account, when you don’t share your plans with anyone.”

“This is common sense. No matter. The Elite, though?”

“They were attacking civilians.”

“They were nonviolent. Refugees in the vicinity of the portal were evacuated. The Elite then made contact with possible settlers who they thought would be interested in paying a premium for good shelter, for resources and supplies. If not paying with cash, then paying with skills. Doctors, talented artists, scholars… it was one of our best bets for re-establishing a hub of development across all of the Earths.”

“They broke the truce,” Tattletale said.

“Again, they were an asset. They were cooperating. The truce hardly stands in this dark hour.”

“They broke the truce,” I echoed Tattletale. “The code has been there since the beginning. If a bigger threat shows up, we band together. We don’t distract each other with attacks or murder attempts, we don’t take advantage of the situation to fuck with civilians. The truce is there for a reason, and it has weight because everyone knows that they can’t handle the trouble that gets express-delivered to their doorsteps when they’ve defied it.”

“Siding with Endbringers could be seen as a violation,” Queen of Wands said. “I seem to recall you participated in an effort to drive out a gang that had escalated too much, too violently, too fast.”

Her eyes fell on Lung.

Were they serious?

“Don’t be fucking stupid,” Faultline said. “If you start going after the Undersiders and Guild for trying to amass enough firepower to take down Scion, then nobody’s going to be able to put up a fight.”

“Hey,” Tattletale said. “Faultline, sticking up for me? This is a first.”

“So you agree with this? Using the Endbringers?” one of the Thanda asked.

Tattletale grinned. “Agree? It was her idea.”

Faultline whipped her head around. “No. No it wasn’t.”

“Talking to the monsters. Well, you said talk to Scion, but this is close. You can have partial credit.”

“I’ll have no such thing. I don’t disagree with this, but I won’t condone it either. This is the Undersider’s plan, they can reap the consequences if it goes wrong.”

Tattletale smiled, but it wasn’t quite a grin. Confident, calm. I doubted anyone but the perception thinkers on the other side could see, but Tattletale was clenching her jaw in an effort to keep her teeth from chattering.

I felt just a little warmer, owing to my hood. I spoke so Tattletale wouldn’t have to try and risk an ill-timed chattering of teeth. “That’s fair. We’ll deal with the consequences, be it a stab in the back from the Endbringers or punishment that follows from any real issues that follow from this. But we will keep going after anyone who violates the truce.”

Rachel stepped forward, her arm pressing against my shoulder and side, as if she was bolstering me with physical presence. Through the bugs I’d planted on him, I could sense Lung folding his arms.

“You will not be taking charge of all of the Endbringers,” the Doctor said. “Teacher emerged with a small force at his disposal. He defeated the Protectorate squads that were deployed at one empty location…”

“The place Khonsu or Tohu were supposed to appear,” Tattletale said.

“Quite. It was Khonsu. The Endbringer has imprinted on Teacher’s group, and he has offered to sell that squad, along with the Endbringer, to a sufficiently wealthy buyer. We agreed, if only to keep this from becoming a monopoly on Endbringers.”

Tattletale smiled a little, but didn’t talk.

“How good of you,” Defiant said.

“We strongly advise you leave Tohu for another party to claim,” the Doctor said. “Focus on the three you have.”

Defiant glanced at Tattletale and I. I looked at Tattletale, reading her expression, before coming to a conclusion. “That’s fine.”

“Then we’re one step closer to a resolution,” the Doctor said. “Much better than the alternative.”

Veiled threats, now? Just how badly had we fucked her plans?

“This is more firepower than we expected to have at this juncture,” the Doctor said. “But not enough by itself. Without sufficient distraction, Scion will treat the Endbringers as he treated Behemoth. We’ll step forward and unveil our own plan B and plan C at the time of battle.”

“Armies,” Tattletale said. “You were collecting people for a reason, and you didn’t release every Case Fifty-three you made.”

“Essentially,” the Doctor said.

“Five groups,” I said, and my eyes fell on Dinah, who was standing beside Faultline. “We should split up so we can respond the instant Scion appears. We make sure every group has some way to maybe occupy him or pin him down, and we move to reinforce.”

Dinah, standing beside Faultline, nodded slowly.

“Four Endbringers, and then Dragon and Teacher to comprise the final group,” the Doctor said. “If Tohu arrives, she can reinforce the weakest group. Quite possibly Bohu.”

“Yes,” Defiant said. He was clutching his spear so tight I thought it would break. He looked to Miss Militia for clarification.

“I’ll run it by Chevalier,” she said, “But I don’t see a problem with this.”

There were heads nodding.

Not enough. We don’t have enough people here. There’s groups missing. People still hiding. People like the Yàngbǎn who are fighting us instead of helping.

I was all too aware of the Simurgh and Leviathan at the corner of my peripheral vision, of Lung and Shadow Stalker, who I could sense with my swarm.

Too many people ready to stab us in the back.

“I would recommend,” the Doctor said, speaking slowly, “That you take your time to visit loved ones, say goodbyes and make your peace. I don’t think there will be another fight after this.”

It was enough. All the different personalities in the Dragonfly, the… how had Tattletale put it, once upon a time? The people who weren’t inclined to play ‘cops and robbers’, who weren’t the types to follow the rules or codes, and were dangerous without a firm hand. Rachel, Lung, Sophia… they fell silent. The fighting stopped.

Because they, even with their unique and personal issues, acknowledged that this wasn’t a situation where you fucked around.

Monitors switched settings without any cue from me. Showing the Simurgh from a distance away, from a different angle. Defiant had switched on his long-ranged cameras.

A moment later, he switched on the cameras in the Dragonfly. The two sets of images alternated across the innumerable displays in the craft. Only the display directly in front of me in the cockpit remained untouched, showing altitude, heading, speed, distance from target, and alerts regarding Scion’s latest appearances.

The Dragonfly changed course, angling to maintain a set distance from the Endbringer. Again, not me.

Defiant seemed content to handle the mechanical end of things. I stood from my seat, stretching a little, before gathering my bugs. Two relay bugs, for safety’s sake. They exited the craft.

No scream from the Simurgh. At least, not one I could detect. It would fit her to keep it beyond our notice, influencing us, the sort of card she would keep up her sleeve. To make the psychic scream ‘audible’, for lack of a better word, purely for spreading fear, then use it subtly at a time when she wasn’t attacking.

The others in the ship hadn’t only gone silent. They’d gone still. I might have taken it for an almost hypnotic paralysis, a sign that something was deeply wrong, but Rachel turned and found a seat on the bench opposite Shadow Stalker.

No, they were still themselves.

My bugs made their way towards the Simurgh, while I chained the two relay bugs together to extend my range.

Fragile, as it only required the death of one bug to sever my connection with the swarm. I didn’t mind. If she acted on my swarm, that was likely to be the least of our worries.

Cameras changed focus, zooming in on the Simurgh’s face, hands and various wingtips, different cameras taking over as the Pendragon and the Dragonfly rotated around her and the cameras lost sight of the features in question. Mosaic views of her features, broken up like I might see if I were looking through the eyes of my bugs, but without my power to coodinate the picture, draw it into something cohesive.

In the corner of each image, metrics, numbers, measurements, as if Defiant hoped to track the slightest movement.

It was the hair that got me. Gossamer-fine, silver-white, straight, it blew in the wind as if each strand were a separate entity. Not in clumps or locks, but a curtain of strands ten times as dramatic as something one might see in a digitally altered hair commercial.

Artificial.

“Seventy,” Tattletale said.

“Hm?” I asked.

“I said I was sixty-five percent sure before. I’m revising it to seventy.”

I nodded.

Hello, Simurgh, I thought. We finally meet.

The Protectorate was strict about who could join the fights against the Simurgh. Capes needed psychological evaluations, they needed to sign documents agreeing to the quarantine procedures, and they needed to be on board with the timetables.

I’d been unable to participate when the Simurgh had attacked flight BA178. When she’d attacked Manchester, I’d been barred from joining the fight by bureaucratic red tape. I had a bad history and I was still on probation. Too likely that I was mentally unstable.

When the Simurgh had hit Paris, I’d gone to Mrs. Yamada, hoping for a therapist’s bill of clean mental health. Or, if not quite that, then at least a go-ahead.

She’d advised me to see it as a good thing, instead. That my participation would be another black mark on my record, another reason for people to be suspicious of me or second guess my decisions.

She’d also very elegantly avoided spelling out that she wasn’t willing to give me that clean bill of mental health. I’d noticed, but hadn’t pressed her on it. She would have been forced to say it straight, and I would have had to hear her say it.

“Ready?” I asked.

“I do the talking, you pass it on,” Tattletale said.

I nodded.

Tattletale sighed. “Look at her. The folly of man, am I right?”

“I don’t know. You have a better idea about whether you’re right, but it… doesn’t fit to me.”

“I’m sure.”

“You’re seventy percent sure.”

“Seventy percent, yes. If I’m wrong, then I’ll be approaching this entire conversation from the wrong angle, and we might wind up siccing an otherwise passive Endbringer on humanity.”

“Let’s hope you’re right, then,” I said.

She nodded.

“Everyone ready?” I asked. I looked around the craft. No responses. Only silent nods.

One head that was shaking. Shadow Stalker.

I touched the screen on the console. “Defiant?”

“Ready when you are,” he said.

“We’re starting right now,” I said. I nodded at Tattletale.

She rolled her shoulders, took in a deep breath, then sighed. “Hello, Endbringer, this-”

I echoed her words, speaking through my bugs as an interpreter might speak in another language.

The instant I had the first word out, alarms went off throughout the ship. The Dragonfly shuddered as meager weapons unfolded from the sides. My visual of the Pendragon showed it was reacting much the same way.

Simurgh had reacted.

She hadn’t attacked, but she had reacted.

She rotated in the air, holding her position, wings flat at her sides. The wings were purely ornamental, much as Behemoth’s bulk and musculature had been. She used telekinesis to move, and she used it now to keep herself oriented in the air, rotating so she matched our orbit around her, her eyes and attention fully fixed on the Dragonfly.

“Th- this is Tattletale speaking, one face in that vast, crazy crowd of humans you’ve been murdering,” Tattletale finished. “Good to see you’re listening. I thought it was about time we had a chat.”

No response, no movement. Odd, to see the screens showing her depicting the zoomed-in images of her face, hands, wings and body and not see them rotating in the picture as they had been before.

Her expression was neutral, but then again, the Simurgh’s expression was always neutral. A face like a doll’s, a cold stare. Beautiful in every conventional sense, in that every classically attractive feature was there, from the delicate, thin frame to the high cheekbones to the luxurious hair… horrifying in the manner it was all framed. The height that put her two to three times the height of an ordinary adult, the wings that filled the space around her. The feathers were surprisingly tough and dense, the edges capable of scoring steel.

Not that she really fought in close quarters, where she could help it.

“Let’s face the facts, Simurgh. Ziz. Israfel. Ulama. Whatever you want to go by. You started acting funny pretty much right away, after Eidolon bit it. Maybe that’s mourning. Maybe you respected him as an enemy, ’cause he was one of only two individuals who could really give you guys a run for your money. Or maybe you had a different relationship.”

Tattletale let the words hang in the air.

“Maybe a parent-child relationship? Maybe he created you.”

The Simurgh didn’t move a muscle. Her hair blew in the wind, and it caught on the features of her face, not even eliciting a blink of her eyes.

I leaned over my chair to hit the button on my cockpit, giving me a view of the inside of the Pendragon.

Defiant, Narwhal, Miss Militia, Saint, Canary, Parian, Foil, Golem, Vista and Kid Win were all present within. Defiant had collected the heroes, the capes who might have been less inclined to throw their hat into the ring if I showed up in the company of Tattletale, Imp and Rachel. He’d been closer to Parian and Foil when I approached him with the plan.

I watched the expressions on their faces, the concern, the alarm and confusion I’d felt only minutes ago. I knew Tattletale hadn’t shared this particular detail. They had to be listening in with some microphone, either a directional one aimed at my swarm outside or one in the Dragonfly.

“They say loneliness breeds the best masters, and it’s awfully lonely at the top,” Tattletale said. “Nobody that can really put up a fight, no excuse to flex his abilities to their fullest, nothing that can really give the man any real stature, next to Legend, who had all the face time with the media. No real role to play, compared to Alexandria, who was managing the PRT. Odd man out.”

I thought of Eidolon, the first time I’d seen him in person. Meeting in preparation for the Leviathan fight in Brockton Bay… Eidolon had been standing off to one side, in a corner, lost in thought.

“Symbiotic, odd as it sounds, what with you trying to kill him and him trying to kill you.”

Still no reaction. No response.

I noted the surroundings. The Simurgh had situated herself above the ocean, an eerie parallel to how Scion had first appeared before humanity. As battlegrounds went, it left her relatively little to manipulate when using her telekinesis, but it also gave us very little ground to stand on if a fight erupted. She’d torn apart Flight BA178. She could tear apart the Dragonfly or the Pendragon if she had a mind to.

Hopefully the other ship would be able to flee, if we couldn’t manage an outright fight.

Tattletale held up a hand, then spoke. “She’s not giving me anything.”

I didn’t repeat it for the Simurgh. I only stared at the screens.

“Did you expect her to?” Imp asked.

“Yeah. Kind of,” Tattletale said.

“She’s not human,” I said. “And, if you’re right about this, she’s only a projection. Her brain doesn’t work like ours does, if it’s even active.”

“She responded when we communicated,” Tattletale said.

I nodded. “Defiant, you listening in?”

On the screen in front of us, Defiant turned to the camera, then nodded once.

“Open to suggestions,” I said.

“We could use powers to try and communicate,” Narwhal said. “Can we express a signal through some other channel? Through our powers?”

“It might be taken as an attack,” I said.

“She’s smart enough to figure out convoluted chains of cause and effect, but not to take a gesture of communication for what it is?” Tattletale asked. “I say we try it.”

“Oh my god,” Shadow Stalker said, her voice quiet. “You’re going to get us all killed.”

“Well, it might be a mercy,” Imp said. “Going out like that, not having to watch the golden man take humanity down piece by piece.”

“Could we try Canary?” I suggested. “If she has any understanding of powers, or if Canary has any influence with things other than humans…”

“I don’t,” Canary said, from within the Pendragon. “I tried using my power on dogs, cats, birds, monkeys…”

Tattletale nodded, like this was something expected. “Bonesaw said something like that. When we get our powers, the passenger manages this sort of scan, trying to figure out a way to apply a part of itself. So Taylor gets a power that’s restricted to bugs, Canary gets a power that’s limited to people. At the same time, the passenger kind of figures out if there’s any danger of the power harming us, physically or mentally, and it sets down safeguards and limits. Headaches like Dinah or I get are part of that. And Eidolon…”

“I don’t… I can’t believe all this,” a woman said. Miss Militia.

“He’s really their creator?” Defiant asked. “Eidolon?”

“…Sixty percent sure. Eidolon’s some kind of exception, on a lot of levels. His power works by different vectors, the innate limits aren’t there… something broke, and I’m betting the Endbringers are tied to it. Like, this entity is fissioning off into countless fragments that impregnate hosts and somehow a little extra gets tacked on. Or Cauldron’s method of replicating the fragments gets that little extra.”

“Yes,” Defiant said. “But how does that help us here?”

“Getting to that. Sort of. Every power has secondary uses, uses that are locked away. But maybe there’s something we can express using the powers, like a kind of parahuman charades. Not, you know, actually miming something, but giving off a vibe.”

“I’ll try whatever,” I said. “Who? How?”

Tattletale smiled. “Oh, this is fun. It’s like a puzzle, but it’s not one with a clear cut answer. Rachel, Canary. Um. Imp too. And Taylor’s right. Any use of power in a way that could be seen as violent might give the wrong cue. So… none of that. Let’s move people between ships. Bitch, to the Pendragon. Leave Bastard behind. Canary, can you get out on top of your ship? And Imp, same for you. We need to distance you from the rest of us.”

“Outside?” Imp asked.

“Outside and away. Where your power doesn’t necessarily have a target. You get me?”

“Three people using their powers,” Defiant said, “Without any valid targets?”

“Exactly,” Tattletale said.

“I could lose my bugs,” I said. “But I’m not sure I can express my power in a case like that.”

“Even if you could, but that would be pretty heavy handed. It’s what we try next if this fails. For now, let’s work with the existing plan.”

I pulled off my flight pack, then handed it to Imp.

“Oh, fun,” she said. “God damn it.”

“No quips? No jokes?” I asked. I helped her find the buckles and straps.

“When I’m done, maybe,” Imp said. She glanced at Tattletale. “I can’t turn my power on. It’s always on. I can turn it off, but that only works so long as I’m paying attention.”

Tattletale shrugged. “Lung would be too violent, and the focus of Vista’s power is too… location-driven? I have no idea how she’d take Narwhal’s power, because it’s pretty evenly split between offense and defense.”

“Kind of abstract,” I said.

“I’m… reaching,” Tattletale confessed. “Definitely reaching. But reaching and abstract thought bought us the portal to Gimel, and I’ve got to flex my power somehow.”

“Somehow,” I agreed. “No, it’s worth a try. Or it will be if it doesn’t provoke her to violently murder us all. Can I make a suggestion, though?”

“Any suggestions are good,” Tattletale said.

“Send Shadow Stalker instead of Imp.”

“You bitch,” Shadow Stalker said. “No.”

“Awesome idea,” Imp said.

“Shadow Stalker’s power doesn’t express itself over an area or any particular medium,” Tattletale said. “It’s more personal.”

“Can’t she represent us?” I asked. “Or can’t the personal effect represent us? If we had Imp flying up there way out of range of any of us, we’re still expecting her to represent our group, or humanity as a whole, aren’t we?”

“Sort of,” Tattletale said.

“Then I’m not sure I see the difference,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Shadow Stalker said. “This is moronic. Charades and acting like powers are some kind of massive signal flag for the Endbringer? You’re lunatics.”

“Send them both?” I suggested.

“Oh, that’s less fun,” Imp said. “You had a working plan, and you’re letting Tattletale convince you otherwise. Come on. Send the psycho crossbow girl and I’ll hang back here. My power would send the total wrong message. Totally.”

“Shh,” Tattletale said. She frowned. “Why Shadow Stalker?”

“Because Imp… is too passive.”

“Way too passive,” Imp murmured.

“So’s Shadow Stalker,” Tattletale said.

“But Shadow Stalker’s passenger isn’t. If there are any undertones, any way that the passengers influence our actions, then Shadow Stalker was definitely influenced. I dug through her old records, read up on her history.”

“What?” Shadow Stalker asked.

“She got aggressive after she got her powers. Generally more…” I searched for the way to phrase it.

“You fucking looked at my records?”

“…More violent than most people would be, in her shoes. Lashing out, aimlessly at first, and then with a target, channeling the aggression. Except it was the same amount of violence, just concentrated into fewer incidents, alongside a pretty extensive bullying campaign.”

“You’re doing this because of a grudge?”

“Let’s do it,” Tattletale said. “Go with our guts. Imp and Shadow Stalker, up on the roof. Bitch, either you or Bastard need to head over to the Pendragon. Canary on the roof of the Pendragon, singing with nobody listening.”

“You’re not getting me outside or any of that shit,” Shadow Stalker said.

“You’re scared,” Imp said. “That’s so cute! Is it a fear of heights or a fear of the Simurgh?”

“I’m not scared,” Shadow Stalker replied. “I’m being sensible. This is lunacy, and for what? Charades with the Endbringer?”

“That was a metaphor,” Tattletale said.

“It sounds fucking stupid.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Imp said. “I’m going. I’m not going to get lumped in with Sissy McNancypants over here and get called a coward.”

“I’m not scared,” Shadow Stalker said.

“We never really got to meet,” Imp said. “Fight or any of that. So I’ve only got the stories I’ve heard about you. Like when you shot Grue with your crossbow and it went right through his stomach? Took him a month to recover? I used to think, you know, you were a badass. But you’re a pussycat.”

“She’s a bully,” I said. “At the end of the day, she only wants to fight opponents she knows she can beat.”

“Fought two Endbringers as part of an army. But going up alone, putting yourself in the line of fire against something that much bigger and stronger than you? No. You’re a bully at heart, and that’s the antithesis of your usual M.O.”

“Fuck you, Hebert. Fuck you.”

The sentence left her mouth, and then she stalked to my right, making her way to the cockpit. She passed through the glass, making her way onto the nose of the ship, where she crouched. Her flapping cloak obstructed the view, even as translucent as it was, but there was no chance we’d hit anything.

It took a minute to arrange. Narwhal created a force field platform and carefully moved Rachel over to the Pendragon. I watched their glacially slow movement and the utterly still Simurgh.

More alarms went off as she moved her head a fraction to watch the floating platform.

It took a few long seconds for my heart to stop trying to jump out of my chest. Not completely oblivious to us petty humans.

“The girl is right. This seems… ridiculous,” Lung rumbled.

Oh, Lung and Shadow Stalker are of like mind, that’s wonderful.

“It is, just a little,” Tattletale said. “But I’m hoping that if this doesn’t exactly work, she’ll give us credit for trying.”

“The Endbringers do not give you credit,” Lung said.

“No, guess not,” Tattletale said. She bent down to scratch Bastard around the ears, then stopped short when he pulled back, clearly uncomfortable with the stranger.

“Ridiculous,” Lung repeated himself. “And you stopped in the middle of a conversation. She is waiting for you to continue.”

“She doesn’t care. Ninety-nine percent sure. Gotta understand, she’s not even close to human, especially once you scratch the surface. We think in black and white, she thinks in… void and substance. In abstracts or in causative contexts, looking into the future and seeing how things unfold. So we’re going to try this, and maybe something sticks.”

“Mm,” Lung said, clearly unimpressed.

“Start us up again?” Tattletale asked me.

I nodded.

“So, Simmy, Eidolon made you, or he’s been enough of an opponent that you’ve kind of got that weird frenemy thing going on. Not in the shitty high school way, but a real love-hate relationship. You know what I mean. You fight them so long you get to know them, you almost respect them on a level, and that respect becomes something more.”

“You’re rambling,” I murmured.

Tattletale shook her head a little. “Whatever the case, you’re reacting to his being gone. We’re here because we’re asking you…”

Tattletale trailed off. She’d noticed something.

My head turned. Canary was singing, and I could hear it through my bugs.

Wordless, insistent, filled with a lot of repressed emotion.

Almost angry.

I shut it out as best as I could, took a second to focus wholly on keeping my power from communicating any sound to me. I hit a button on the dashboard, then spent a few seconds tracking down one of Dragon’s programs.

Defiant found it first, loading it onto the Dragonfly’s system. It began filtering out the singing. Most of it.

But no sooner had Canary’s Song gone away than the Simurgh began screaming.

Not as intense as I’d heard it described. Barely audible.

More ominous than anything.

“Not full strength,” Miss Militia’s voice came over the comms. “I give us five minutes. Wrap this up.”

I unclenched my hands, belatedly realizing I’d been squeezing them so hard they almost hurt. My fingernails throbbed where they’d been almost bent against my palms. If I’d not been wearing my gloves, I might have pierced the skin. I flexed my hands to work out the tension that had accumulated and exhaled slowly.

“We’re here,” Tattletale started again, “Because we’re asking you for help. For vengeance. For your strength. We want you and the rest of the Endbringers on board to stop Scion.”

The Simurgh didn’t react.

“I don’t care if you’re doing it to fuck with us, though I’d prefer it if you saved any backstabbing for when Scion’s dead and gone. Fucking wipe us out. I don’t care. Just so long as we go out with a bang, taking him out with us.”

I made a hand gesture, urging Tattletale to move on.

“…Do it for the psychological impact, leave a mark. Or do it because Scion killed Behemoth, your brother, and some part of you is programmed with a sense of kinship or whatever. But above all else, I’m hoping you’ll help us murder that golden alien motherfucker because he killed Eidolon, and he stripped you of your purpose.”

Sixty percent sure, I thought. Tattletale had revised her number. How confident was she now?

The speech had no meat to it if Eidolon hadn’t made the Endbringers.

Very little if he had.

Tattletale held up her hand to me again, another sign that I shouldn’t repeat what she was saying, because she was talking to us. “Fuck this. It’s like talking to a fucking answering machine. I feel like some dim asshole with no idea what I’m talking about. There’s no feedback, no responses to read and judge for the next line.”

“Well,” I said. “She’s not exactly your usual target.”

“What do you usually do?” Narwhal asked.

“Needle someone until they get upset, then find cues in that. I’d do that here, except irritating the Simurgh seems like an excuse to get a Darwin Award.”

“Tattletale’s being cautious. Must be the end of the world after all,” someone said. Might have been Foil.

“She’s singing,” Tattletale said. “So that’s either a good sign or a very bad sign.”

“Going by the numbers,” Miss Militia said, “If we assume it’s half strength, I’d say three minutes before we have to abort.”

“Maybe tell Canary to stop,” I said.

“No,” Tattletale said. “We’re getting a response. Let’s hold out.”

“Then keep talking,” Defiant said.

Tattletale sighed. She perched herself on the bench, hands on her head. “I don’t know if I should continue buying into this Eidolon thing. Less convinced the further we go. Most times, you get that key piece of information, and you can coast from there.”

“Reduce,” Defiant said. “We’re trying to convey a message to a being that we don’t wholly understand. You’re appealing to sympathy, to revenge. Something simpler?”

“Like?” Tattletale asked.

“They have a sense of self preservation,” Narwhal said. “They run when we hurt them enough. Fear?”

“Because it allows them to maintain their mission,” Tattletale said. “I don’t think we can actually scare her, either. Scion might, but we can’t.”

The screaming was getting worse. Warbling, with highs and lows. It snagged on my attention, making it harder to maintain a train of thought.

Maybe she was reaching out to us, communicating. Maybe she was just doing her thing, trying to worm her way into our heads so she could figure out how we functioned, put her plans into motion.

“Anger,” Rachel said.

I turned my head.

There was a long pause. I glanced at the screen on the cockpit to see what she was doing, but she’d stopped by the time I got there to look. “When I cut Behemoth’s leg off, after we’d melted most of him away, he was angry. Stomped around, attacked more. Kept fighting until he died. Didn’t he?”

I remembered the various incidents that had unfolded in her wake. Echidna, the sundering of the PRT. Things with ramifications that were affecting us even now.

“…A very scary possibility,” I amended.

Lung gave me a funny look.

“Yes,” he said, agreeing with me.

Tattletale made a gesture, pointing at herself.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Okay, Ziz. I’m going to be honest. You’re pretty fucked. You and I both know you were made by somebody or something. Accidentally, probably. You were designed to give us as hard a time as possible without exterminating us altogether, probably to feed someone’s ego, unbeknownst to them. But what happens when we’re all gone? What’s the fucking point of you?”

Tattletale paused. Waiting, watching.

No reaction from Tattletale.

“What happens when we’re all gone? You’re tapped into a power source. Maybe most power sources. You’re draining them dry just to keep yourselves going. There’s nothing for you to do but linger, when there’s no humans left. To hibernate. So you’re gathering your forces. You’re planning one last act, probably for a few days from now, where you wipe out humanity, and I’m betting it’s one last desperate, sad attempt to validate your existence.”

Alarms went off once more. The Simurgh had moved, her head turning to look over one shoulder, flexing wings to move them out of the way, as if she couldn’t see through them but she could see well past the horizon.

She returned to the same posture as before.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“Checking,” Defiant said. “Keep going. Any reaction is a good reaction.”

Maybe it was Scion, arriving just in time to pick a fight with the Simurgh.

I could hope.

Tattletale continued, and I repeated what she was saying verbatim, trying to even match her in tone and pitch. “Here’s what I’m thinking. Shot in the dark. You’re wanting to fight humanity because you’re trying to carry out the old programming, and Scion invalidated that by killing Eidolon, by killing someone else or destroying something. I think that fighting and nearly killing a few billion humans is the equivalent of fighting and nearly killing Eidolon. Or whoever.”

“One hundred and eighty integers of longitude to the west,” Defiant said. “Leviathan just arrived. That’s what got her attention.We expected one to appear there, so Chevalier ordered us to put crews there with cameras for monitoring. They’re there right now, reporting to me.”

A monitor shifted, depicting Leviathan, standing on the water’s surface in the midst of a heavy rainstorm. The water around him was rippling, though he was utterly still.

Tattletale continued without pause, not responding or reacting to this information. “All I’m saying, all I’m proposing, is that Scion’s a better bet than we are. You want to give someone a fucking hard time? Make that someone Scion. You want to terrorize people? Terrorize Scion. Bigger challenge, and you’ll probably have the rest of us fucking scared out of our minds if you pull it off. You want to fucking end the world? Get in line, chickadee, because Scion’s going to beat you to the punch if you don’t stop him.”

Tattletale was almost breathless, speaking faster, with more emotion. It was a challenge to convey that with a voice generated by the swarm.

“Or maybe you don’t care. Maybe you’re nothing more than what you appear to be on the surface. Head games and taking credit for shit you didn’t do. Maybe you’re just a projection, blank between the ears, mindless, heartless, pointless.”

The ship moved a fraction, then adjusted, the autopilot kicking in.

“Did you feel that?” I asked. Tattletale had gone silent, and there were no words left for me to translate.

“We did.”

A reaction? I adjusted the monitors, turning everything back to the Simurgh, looking for any clue, any hint.

But she didn’t have body language. Every action was deliberate. She didn’t have any that weren’t.

Tattletale’s voice was low. I did what I could to match it, speaking through a swarm of over a million individual insects and arachnids. “You’re supposedly this magnificent genius, and this is how you go out? With a whimper? Petering out like a stream without a source? You’re honestly telling me there isn’t anything more to you?”

Another rumble, another shift, somewhat more violent.

“Enough, Tattletale.” Defiant’s voice.

“They run on different patterns. Fair bit of anger, room for some vengeance. Cleverness, sure. More in her than in Behemoth. Some killer instinct, maybe… a blend of fear and caution. Not so they’re afraid, but so they can temper their actions. This? Right here? It’s the closest we’re about to get to communicating directly with a passenger.”

“I understand,” Defiant said. “But that’s enough.”

“They’re passengers?” I asked.

“The shell? No. The outer shell, the concept, the execution, they’re tapping into religious metaphors. The devil, the serpent, the angel, buddha, mother earth, the maiden, each connected in turn to fundamental forces. Flame, water, fate, time, earth, the self. Things deep-seated and fundamental to their creator’s belief system, because that’s how the passengers interpret our world. Through us. But deep down? Beyond that surface, beyond the basic programming that drives them to do what they’ve been doing for thirty years? It’s the passenger’s brush strokes. And I’m getting to her.”

“No you’re not,” Defiant said. “Because you’re stopping now.”

“Fuck that,” Tattletale said.

“You’re stopping now because it worked.”

One by one, the monitors throughout the Dragonfly shifted, until the one at the very front was the only one that still showed the Simurgh.

The Dragonfly changed course as we looked at the scene that was showing on every other monitor.

The Azazel, airborne. D.T. officers within were standing by the windows, while one with a camera was holding it above their heads, aiming it towards the window, pointed at the water.

A dark mass was beneath.

Leviathan, matching pace with the ship.

The Dragonfly and Pendragon broke from their orbit around the Simurgh.

The Simurgh followed.

■

The Yàngbǎn tore through the settlement, barely visible, as fast as arrows loosed from a bow.

One set of powers to give them speed, another to give them the ability to create crude images, illusions, blurry and indistinct.

A weak power, but far less so when coupled with the fact that they were making themselves just as blurry and indistinct. To top it off, they were making themselves invisible for fractions of a second, and they were lashing out with short blades of cutting energy when they reappeared, slicing through the Australian refugees.

Bombs went off, coordinated, ripping through the spaces the Yàngbǎn had already passed through, cleaning up the ones who’d survived, killing the rescue personnel who were trying to save lives.

Earth Tav, barely two million people spread out across the globe, with this being the largest population center, based around the portal that Faultline, Labyrinth and Scrub had erected.

Without this base for supplies and communication, the other settlements would falter. Disease would be crippling, food would be scarce at best.

And the Yàngbǎn would no doubt reap the rewards, claiming the planet for the C.U.I.

The Pendragon led the way through the portal, and it suffered the brunt of the bombs that the Yàngbǎn had left in their wake, no doubt to stop any reinforcements.

The Pendragon sank, no longer fully airborne, and the Dragonfly’s cameras could see as Golem, Vista and Cuff did what they could to patch it together.

Not enough. It landed, hard.

Another bomb went off as the Pendragon hit ground. Had the Yàngbǎn plotted that? A second line of defense?

“Everyone okay?” I asked.

“Give us a minute. Nobody dead.“

At least the Pendragon was a combat ship, meant to take a beating. If the Dragonfly had been the first one through, we would have been obliterated. At best, we’d have managed to evacuate with parachutes, flight packs and shadow-form powers.

We passed through the area the Pendragon had cleared. One small ship against what had to be thirty Yàngbǎn members. They didn’t move, but flickered, existing as scarce smudges and streaks of black and an odd midnight blue from the regions of their heads. They cast out more smudges in matching colors with their image generation powers, turned invisible for one or two seconds at a time when they saw opportunities to catch refugees off guard. Some merely killed. Others slashed at eyes or ears, removed hands. Butchered.

What would the C.U.I. want with scores of butchered people?

It wasn’t really the fault of the individual Yàngbǎn members. They were brainwashed, subsumed into this collective of shared powers, their identities erased.

But that didn’t make their actions forgivable.

The Simurgh followed behind the Dragonfly, moving each wing until it was pointed straight behind her as she sailed through the narrow, oddly-shaped portal.

When she unfolded her wings, extending each until a veritable halo of them surrounded her, a complete circle, I could feel my heart skip a beat.

“We need to give her orders,” Tattletale said.

I nodded, mustering my swarm into a group large enough to communicate.

But there was no need. She flew past us.

The singing had died down, but it welled up at full strength. I almost staggered.

Rubble began to peel away from the demolished settlement beneath us. Metal, bombs, pieces of structures.

As she reached less damaged areas, she picked up construction vehicles.

The fragments of metal around her were like a dense cloud, almost obscuring her, massive wings and all.

The singing increased in pitch.

A bomb detonated in the midst of the storm of debris, breaking up a bulldozer in the process.

Below her, the scene had gone still. Yàngbǎn raider and civilian alike had gone still. The smudges consolidated into forms.

Not the same Yàngbǎn I’d encountered before. These ones wore similar outfits, but there were bodysuits beneath, no bare skin. The multifaceted gem designs that covered their faces were dark blue, their costumes black.

Infiltrators. A sub-set. One of five sub-groups, apparently.

The debris settled into a single shape, drawing together. Nothing welded, nothing screwed in together. Merely a crude device, held together by telekinesis.

A fat, snub-nosed cannon, twice as long as she was tall. She fired it, and the resulting bullet was nearly ten feet across, a sphere of hot metal.

It crashed into a trio of Yàngbǎn.

She used her telekinesis to sweep it off to the right. The misshapen bullet was compressed into a rough sphere in the time it took to soar down a long road, smashing through two members of the Yàngbǎn. A bystander was clipped, spinning violently before collapsing in a heap. Shattered arm and ribs, if not dead.

I bit my lip.

“Don’t injure civilians,” I communicated through the swarm.

She gave no sign she’d listened. Her telekinesis grabbed four members of the Yàngbǎn who’d gotten too close, lifting them by their costumes or by some other debris that had surrounded them.

As if launched by catapults, they flew straight up, where they disappeared into the clouds above.

I winced as the screaming increased in intensity by another notch.

Did she have to do that?

I felt a touch of paranoia, not just at the idea, but at the fact that I’d been concerned. Paranoia over the fact I was feeling paranoid.

The Simurgh had crafted another gun. They floated around her like satellites, firing only in those intermittent moments when she’d formed and loaded the necessary ammunition.

“Those are my guns,” Kid Win reported over the comms. “Bigger, but mine.“

I didn’t like that she was screaming. It set an ugly tone to this whole venture.

I really didn’t like that we couldn’t direct her that well. We were ending this confrontation decisively, we were probably even doing it more cleanly and with less damage to civilians than there would be if we’d handled it ourselves.

But we’d brought the Simurgh here and people were getting hurt as collateral damage. That was on us, everything else aside.

“I… don’t know what to feel right now,” Imp said.

“It doesn’t feel good,” I said.

“I wish I knew what I’d said that got her on board,” Tattletale said. “I went with the shotgun approach, trying to see what stuck… and now I don’t know what to leverage if we need to do it again.”

“You’re so whiny,” Rachel said. “You say we need her help, we got it. Good. Maybe now we can fight.”

“Mm,” Lung grunted. “This is true. But I’ve seen what happens if you do something like this, something big, and you fall. You fall hard.”

I nodded at that. “Wise words, Lung. Well said.”

“Do not talk to me,” he rumbled.

I only shook my head.

“Fuck me, you guys are serious?” Shadow Stalker murmured. “This is good? This is luck. There’s a reason I stick to my fists and my crossbow. They’re reliable. This Endbringer thing most definitely isn’t.”

“Of course it isn’t,” I said. “But you know that whole saying, finding a boyfriend? Young, smart, wealthy, pick two? We don’t get to pick two, here. Options at the end of the world: clean, safe, effective, pick one.”

“We got Bohu, but she doesn’t move fast at all,” Tattletale said. “Leviathan’s on his way to pay the Elite a visit. Collateral damage could be ugly there.”

“It isn’t sustainable,” I said. “Somehow, I don’t think they’re going to sit still if we ask them to. What happens if we run out of enemies to attack? If we need to put Leviathan to work and there aren’t any targets that don’t involve even more collateral damage than we’ll see when he attacks the Elite?”

“People are going to fall in line damn fast,” Tattletale said.

“Probably,” I said. “Or they’ll run for the hills.”

“Win-win,” Tattletale said. “We were saying we needed people to split up more.”

The Simurgh opened fire, striking out with three guns, striking a neighborhood that had already been reduced to dust and flame by a series of bomb blasts.

“Somehow,” Imp commented, “This doesn’t scream win-win to me.”

I nodded.

“Nothing saying this isn’t another clever plan, set up to fuck with us, destroy our last shreds of hope,” I said.

The Yàngbǎn were opening fire. Projectiles that moved slowly, splitting in the air until there was a virtual storm of them. Had they been aimed at the Dragonfly, we wouldn’t have been able to dodge. The Simurgh flew between the bullets like they weren’t even a concern. Debris blocked the shots.

In the midst of her maneuvering, she drew together a third gun from the storm of debris.

Then she somersaulted, heels over head as she rapidly shifted direction.

In the moment it took her to build acceleration, she looked directly at the camera.

The news came through the earbuds, and it was like a shockwave rippled through our assembled ranks. Some of the strongest of us dropped to their knees, staggered, or planted their feet further apart as though they were bracing against a physical impact.

The one Azazel that was still in the area landed atop one of Bohu’s buildings, nearly falling as a section slid off to drop to the empty street below. It found its footing and roosted there.

The pilot couldn’t fly, and the A.I. wasn’t willing or able to take over.

The other capes were talking, shouting, asking questions, sometimes to nobody in particular. With the blood churning in my ears, I couldn’t make out the words. I’d used my bugs to find Hookwolf’s core, but they’d been decimated twice over in the process, and I wasn’t interested in trying to use them to figure out what was being said.

I could guess.

I raised my arms, then found myself unsure what to do with them. Hug them against my body? Hit something? Reach out to someone?

I let my hands drop to my sides.

I opened my mouth to speak, to shout, to cry out, swear at the overcast sky above us.

Then I shut it.

There were no words. Anything I could do or say felt insignificant in the grand scheme of it all. I could have used every bug in the city to utter something, something meaningful or crude, and it still would have felt petty.

I looked at the others. Clockblocker was with Kid Win and Vista, Crucible and Toggle were nearby, on the back of a PRT van, bandaged. They were looking over their shoulders at the screen mounted on the wall of the van. Footage, covering ruined landscapes, and what had used to be the United Kingdom.

Parian and Foil were hugging. Odd, to see Foil hunched over, leaning on Parian for support, her forehead resting at the corner of Parian’s neck and shoulder. The crossbow had fallen to the ground, forgotten.

I wanted something like that. To have a team close, to hold someone. I hadn’t had something like that in a good while.

Chevalier was a distance away, his cannonblade plunged into the ground so he didn’t need to hold it, a phone to his ear. He was talking, giving orders, and demanding information.

Revel was stock still, not far from him. I watched as she stepped back, leaning against a wall, then let herself slide down until she was sitting on the street. She placed her head in her hands.

I’d never known her to show any weakness. She’d always been on the ball, always the leader. I knew how much concussions sucked, and I’d seen her carry on and contribute to the Behemoth fight when she was reeling from one.

It hit me harder than I might have expected, to see that.

Tecton was standing a distance away, almost frozen, his eyes on the screen of his armband. Golem did the same, but he wasn’t still. He paced, looking around for guidance and finding none, then turned back to the screen, watching.

Glancing at the images from a distance, I could see the figure, the speck visible on the long range camera, surrounded by a golden nimbus.

I wasn’t close enough to make out details. Only staccato flares of golden-white light. On the third, the screens fizzled, showing only brief gray static, then darkness.

Another target hit. He’d taken his time on that one, measured the attacks.

I took out my earbud before the report could come in. Not my focus right now.

Instead, I reached for my phone. I dialed the Dragonfly.

Would the A.I. be able to cope? Saint had apparently pulled something.

If there was any hint he fucked us here, he’d pay for it.

The phone responded with a message. An ETA.

My eyes turned to Rachel. She was more agitated than Golem, her attention on her dogs. She used a knife to cut away the excess flesh and retrieve the animals from the placenta-like sacs within their bodies, and the actions were aggressive, vicious, savage. Her expression was neutral, but I could see the way the muscles shifted in her back, beneath the sleeveless t-shirt she wore, the tension, the way she was hunched over.

The attitude fit the Bitch I’d been introduced to, way back when I’d first joined the Undersiders, not the Rachel I’d come to know, who’d found a kind of peace.

Angry, defensive, bewildered. Scared of a world she didn’t comprehend. Aggressiveness was the default, the go-to route when there weren’t any answers.

It dawned on me. I sympathized. Given a chance, given something to do in that same vein, hacking through dead meat with a knife for some defined purpose, I might have acted exactly the same way.

She flinched as I approached, as if I were invading her personal space. When she turned and glanced at me out of the corner of one eye, glowering, the tension faded.

I drew my own knife and started helping. Bugs flowed into the gap and gave me a sense of where the sac was. I was able to cut without risking cutting the dog inside. It helped that my knife was sharp.

We were both sweating by the time we finished. Rachel had already been sweating from more physical exertion, and her hair was stuck to her shoulders at the ends. The German Shepherd got free, walked a polite distance away and then shook herself dry.

I looked at my phone, my gray gloves crimson with the dog’s blood. There were incoming messages. Updates on the damage, the disaster, and on Scion’s current location.

I ignored them, looking for the Dragonfly’s status.

Minutes away. It had already been headed into the area by default, tracking me by my GPS, ready to maintain a constant distance until I was prepared to call for it.

That was fine. I started walking down the length of the street, my back to the others, to the Azazels and the heroes. Rachel fell into step just a bit behind me, her dogs and Bastard accompanying us.

Parian and Foil were still hugging. I paused as we passed them, tried to think of how to word the invitation.

Parian’s eyes weren’t visible, hidden behind the lenses on the white porcelain mask she wore. I hadn’t thought she was looking at me, but she shook her head a little.

Good. Easier. I left them behind.

The Dragonfly started to land in an open area, an intersection of two streets. Moments later, the ground began to crumble. The craft shifted position, coming perilously close to striking a building as it avoided falling into the hole that had appeared in the street. A trap.

Rachel boarded the craft. As I waited for the dogs and Bastard to join us, I looked into the pit. As deep as a six or seven story building was tall.

I turned away, boarding the Dragonfly. I plotted a course, then took manual control of the craft.

The A.I. was better at flying than I was, but flying meant I didn’t have to think. Didn’t have to worry about what I was about to find out.

Rachel didn’t seat herself at the bench along the wall, or even at the chair behind mine. She sat down beside me, on the floor of the Dragonfly, her back against the side of my seat, the side of my leg, staring out the narrow side window. It was physical contact, reassurance, seeking that same reassurance from me. Her dogs settled on either side of her, Bastard resting his head on her lap.

We had the whole country to cross. Every few minutes brought more visuals, more reminders of what had occurred. Highways grew choked with cars. Countless vehicles had stopped at the sides of roads, at the edges of fields and at the fringes of small towns.

Innumerable people running, seeking escape. Except there wasn’t anyplace good to escape to.

No. That wasn’t true. There was.

But the degree of the damage done was becoming clear. Before we even reached the East coast, I could see the damage done to the landscape. Smoke was only just settling around the cracks and fissures, fallen bridges and ruined highways. People were making concerted attempts to move, to leave, but every step of the way brought more difficulties, more forced detours. Some had abandoned cars altogether, wading or swimming across rivers to make their way.

Every step of the trip revealed more devastation, successively more vehicles choking roads and highways, forging paths around impassable roads. More and more people were forging ahead on foot, in crowds, because walking was faster than travel by car.

More helicopters, marked with red crosses, had taken to the skies. Travel by ambulance wasn’t doable.

This was one place. One moment’s attack. The display in the cockpit was showing more locations hit. Libya, Russia, France, Sweden, Iran, Russia again, China…

Time passed. Forty-five minutes from the point in time I started paying attention to the clock, searching for a yardstick to try to track the scale of what I was seeing on the surface. How much worse did things get in five more minutes of traveling? In ten? It all seemed to get exponentially worse as the Dragonfly took flight. It wasn’t just that we were getting closer to the point where the attack had hit. Enough time had passed that people could react, now, realizing just how severe this was. All of the power of Behemoth, mobility almost on par with Khonsu.

The psychological toll of a Simurgh attack.

These were the people with a strategy. Doing just what I’d be doing if I were one of the unpowered. The world was doomed, so they sought to flee to another world. Problem was, there were tens of millions of them, and the escape routes were scarce at best.

The best known escape route: Brockton Bay.

I felt my heart sink as we approached the coast. Mountains I’d grown up with weren’t there. I let the autopilot take over as we got closer, approaching an airspace choked by rescue aircraft.

I didn’t trust my own hands.

It had collapsed. The blast had only struck the northern edge of Brockton Bay, then changed orientation, striking through the bay itself to slice through the very foundation the city sat on. Everything had been dropped a solid thirty or forty feet. Tall buildings had collapsed and only the squatter, sturdier structures and those fortunate enough to come to rest against other buildings were still mostly erect.

Folding and collapsing, the entire city had been shattered, no section of the ground more than twenty-five feet across remained fully intact. The landscape rose and fell like waves, petrified and left frozen in time.

The portal tower had fallen, but the portal remained there, oddly bright, too high to reach on foot. Work crews were struggling to erect something beneath, so the civilians could finish their journeys. The new arrivals were alternately joining in with the construction and making their way inside by way of rope ladders.

Elsewhere, there were capes and rescue crews trying to contain the fallout around the scar. A structure had been raised to seal it off, but the collapse of the city had released the contents. A lot of containment foam was being deployed to slow the spread of a pale patch of earth, and there was one spot of fire that didn’t seem to be going out.

But the most eye-catching thing was a thin, scintillating forcefield that was holding off the water. It was taller than any building that had stood in the city, an artificial dam. Every few minutes, it flickered for a tenth of a second, and water would flood through to seep into the gaps and fissures. In time, I suspected, the water would cover everything in the area but the tallest buildings and the hills. Arcadia High might stick around. Maybe.

I recognized the rainbow hues. It was the same force field that had been intended to protect the Protectorate headquarters. Leviathan had torn the structure apart at the roots, and the tidal wave had knocked it into the city proper. In the time since I’d left, they’d repurposed the fallen structure and the forcefield setup.

Not, apparently, to try to block Scion’s attack. No. This was more to stop the water, to break that initial wave, so it wouldn’t simply sweep the ruins out to sea.

I could only hope they’d done similar things elsewhere, to minimize the damage.

We circled the city twice before I gave the go-ahead for the A.I. to start descending.

My second sense extended through the area as we approached the ground, extending out to the bugs that were scattered throughout the ruined, shattered city. I immediately set them to work, searching, scanning, investigating.

I changed the course, dictating a final, slow, sweep of the city.

Not everyone had made it. Stupid to think they might.

My dad’s house was gone, collapsed. Nobody inside.

Winslow High, gone.

The mall, the library, Fugly Bob’s, the boat graveyard, my old hideout, gone.

My old territory, unrecognizable. The Boardwalk was underwater now.

It didn’t even take him seconds to do.

Too many dead, not enough who were merely wounded and unable to walk. Humans were so fragile in the end. I stopped the Dragonfly and stepped out to seek out the first wounded. My bugs signaled rescue teams to get their attention.

The wounded here could have been my dad’s coworkers. People he went out to drinks with. They could have been Charlotte’s underlings.

So easy, in the midst of it all, to lose track of the fact that these were people. People with families, friends, with dreams, lives and goals.

Golem had said something like that, hadn’t he?

How many people had simply been erased in the wake of something this random, so instantaneous? So inexplicable? I still wasn’t sure what had happened. Tattletale was supposed to fill people in, but she hadn’t gotten in contact with me.

Or had she? I’d taken my earbud out. I looked to my phone, looked for transmissions.

A burst of messages, following just after takeoff. From the Chicago Protectorate, people who might have been my teammates if I’d ever been inaugurated. More messages, from Chevalier and the Brockton Bay teams.

I didn’t read them all. My eyes on the phone, I pointed the search and rescue to the next batch of wounded. I knew it was cold, but the corpses would have to wait. There were living people to find.

There were no shortage of corpses. The number of living people, by contrast, well… we’d see what happened in the next twenty-four hours.

The number of messages declined about thirty minutes after takeoff, then stopped altogether. Everyone who might have wanted to talk to me had found other things that needed doing. Other priorities, personal or professional.

Which was exactly why I was here. I’d just arrived at that conclusion earlier than they had. I put my phone away.

My mouth was pressed into a firm line as I helped the rescue workers.

We lifted a corner of a second floor’s floor, making room for someone get under and start retrieving a pair of women. Rachel whistled and pointed, and her German Shepherd seized the floor in its jaws.

The rescue workers seemed to hesitate with the dog’s presence, so I took the lead, crawling inside on my stomach. I used my hands with the arms on my flight pack to move enough debris that we could slide the second woman out.

There were more. Almost without thinking about it, I let myself slide back into the mindset I’d held for the past two years. Sublimating what I wanted to do in favor of doing what needed to be done.

Minutes ran into one another as we worked. I could see Rachel growing progressively more short-tempered, slower to give the orders, hanging back, rushing with the jobs.

That ended when we rescued a child that had a puppy wrapped in her arms. She clutched the limp animal like it was a security blanket, not crying, not speaking. She only stared at the ground, coughing hoarsely whenever she had to move. Her parents had been on either side of her, and neither had made it.

The paramedics fit her with an oxygen mask, but they failed to pry the animal from her arms.

I looked at Rachel, but she only shook her head.

Rachel’s power healed animals, but this one was gone.

From the moment we left that girl to be loaded onto a stretcher and carried off to firmer ground, Rachel moved a little more quickly, a little more decisively.

We finished with one site where the ground had collapsed and people had fallen into a depression, and then moved on to the next area. Some heroes were working alongside the authorities to try to rescue people from a building that had partially tipped over.

Clockblocker was there, along with Vista. I joined my powers to theirs in finding people and opening the way. Frozen time was used on panels, which were subsequently layered, so that one could offer support if another stopped working prematurely. Vista reinforced areas, then opened doorways, as I designated rooms where people were trapped within.

A golden light streaked across the sky in the wake of Scion’s flight, just along the horizon. A thinner beam being directed from Scion to the ground as he passed.

The aftershock of his passing took time to reach us. Steam started to billow, but the forcefield absorbed it.

The shuddering of the ground was more problematic. The entire city rumbled in response to the distant attack, a blow that was no doubt slicing deep into the earth’s crust, forcing everything to resettle.

The building we were working on was among those things that resettled. I watched as the building started to slide where it was resting against the building beside it, slowly descending, building speed.

My flight pack kicked in, and I flew through a window. I could feel the glass scrape against my scalp and the fabric of my costume.

I found one person, a twenty-something guy, took hold of their wrist, and pulled them behind me, running and using my flight pack at the same time.

Tearing him through the window meant slashing him against the shattered glass, and the weight wasn’t something I could manage with my flight pack. The building fell down around the people on the ground as I fell too far, too fast.

The wing on my flight pack was still broken. Couldn’t trust the propulsion.

I let him fall into a tree instead, from a solid two stories above, and then focused the rest of my energy into pulling out of the plunge.

The building was still crumbling as I landed a distance away. The rumble brought other, smaller structures down. I stood and watched as it continued its course.

There’d been seven more people to rescue inside. The other buildings in the area that had been caught up in the domino effect had contained three more. That was just in my range. How many more were dying as he continued towards the mainland, cutting deep into the plate of land that the landmass was perched on?

He hadn’t even been near us. Closer to New York or Philadelphia than anything. More lives taken, purely collateral.

When the dust settled, I moved in to help the people who had been on the ground. Vista and Clockblocker had protected most, between a dome and a shelf of land to provide shelter. Rachel, for her part, had helped others run in time, snatching them up with her dogs, but I counted three more dead, one dying.

Seeing them like that, bleeding, still warm, it caught me off guard. A kind of anxiety rose in the pit of my stomach, like an impulse to do something coupled with the frustration of knowing that everything I could manage to come up with was futile, hopeless. I either couldn’t do anything or I couldn’t think of what to do. It put me in mind of being back at high school, before I had my powers. Of being a child, powerless and unable to act.

I saw the image of Parian holding Foil in my mind’s eye, and it was joined by an almost sick feeling of mingled relief and fear. I knew exactly what I wanted and I was terrified to seek it out.

I could feel that same impatience Rachel had expressed earlier, but I couldn’t turn my back on this. I got the guy out of the tree and found him okay, but for a broken arm. He didn’t thank me, but I let myself chalk that up to him being in shock. I almost stumbled over to the latest injured and I attended to the wounded until the medics pulled themselves together, got organized and relieved me.

I didn’t really have a home anymore. Knowing my old house was leveled, that the cemetery where my mother had been laid to rest was gone, and that I’d never really come back here to hang out with the Undersiders… it hurt in a way that was very different from a knife wound, being shot or being burned. A crushing feeling, more like. But it was tough for reasons beyond the fact that I considered it home. I’d relinquished Brockton Bay, and my concern right now was more to do with the residents than the place itself.

I didn’t have a home in Chicago. Not in the jails, either.

But Rachel had forged a home for herself, and it had been in arm’s reach since we’d arrived.

Bastard and the dogs seemed to know I’d decided before I said or did anything. Rachel and I fell in step behind them.

Rachel mounted Bastard before we got to the portal. The efforts to erect a proper support beneath the portal had been set back by Scion’s strafing run, which left the portal hanging in the sky. Train tracks extended out from the portal in every direction, twisted and broken where collapsing ground had pulled other sections away.

There had been a tower erected around the portal, but it had collapsed into shambles as the ground dropped. Now they were using the pieces to form the general structure for a tower of ramps that would lead up to the portal.

Bastard picked up speed as he approached the tower, then set his claws on one of the ramps. The tower wavered perilously as Bastard leaped up to a higher point, coming to a rest on the very top of the dilapidated structure. It didn’t look like there were nearly enough reinforcements, and I could see everyone present tense as they saw the mutated wolf’s weight come to rest.

That tension redoubled as the wolf flexed its muscles, hunching down, and then leaped, more up than across, to get to the portal itself. A few planks of wood broke in that sudden, powerful movement, and one rail of the train track fell free as the wolf scrabbled for a grip on the ground beneath the portal.

When she was gone, the people beneath simply resumed work, heads down, dirty, defeated.

I took flight, entering the portal for the first time.

Earth Gimel.

The tower that contained the portal had a counterpart in Gimel, a matching tower, tall and riddled with train tracks, like a train station designed by Escher, tall rather than squat, with wide doorways for the trains to exit, and complicated reinforcements for the aboveground tracks, positioned so as not to interfere with the tracks below.

I flew out through one of those gates, catching up with Rachel.

Trains extended in every direction from the portal, on tracks that extended out into the middle of nowhere, into pristine forest and mountains. They were long, almost absurdly long.

Then again, the whole idea had been to have instant evacuation. Rather than have people make their way to trains, they’d had eight trains that simply spanned the length of Brockton Bay, so any given individual had to find the nearest train car and make their way down the aisle to an empty seat.

Around the tower, a small, odd settlement had sprung up. All of the sensibility of the city, but contained to a small area. Tall buildings, wide streets, and a look that matched up with a city proper rather than a smaller town. It was as though someone had cut and pasted the big city into the middle of this landscape.

On any other day, it would have been energizing, the fresh air, the sunny day, the green and the blue water of the bay, subtly different from the shape of the bay I knew. But today wasn’t that day.

People at benches were clipping the corners off of refugee’s drivers licenses and trading them for food rations and tents. Everything was prepped, set up in advance, and people were being orderly, even though the lines were so lengthy it looked like it might be hours before they got what they wanted.

Those that already had their kits were setting up or settling into spaces they’d designated for themselves. Some clustered close to the settlement, while others spaced out, where they’d have more elbow room. The tents were identical, dotting the area. The kits, apparently, included signs, and these same signs listed family names and details.

I scanned the signs, looking for names I might recognize. I headed in the direction Rachel had gone, but I moved carefully, making a mental note of everything I saw.

It was an extension of what I’d seen back in Los Angeles. People trying to cope against something where coping was a pipe dream. There were some breaking down in tears, people getting angry, those who had withdrawn into themselves.

In each expression, there was something that echoed my own feelings. A part of me wanted to hide from that, but another part of me knew I couldn’t.

It wouldn’t do any good, but I made a mental note of faces, of the pain, the loss. People who’d been removed from their homes and had all hopes for the future dashed. If I ever had the opportunity to get revenge, to get back at Scion for doing this, I wanted to remember these faces, find just a little more strength, make it hurt that much more.

But I wasn’t one for simply wanting to help, paying lip service and promising vengeance felt hollow. Instead, as a token gesture, something that might not even be noticed, I gathered up every mosquito in range and proceeded to murder them with other bugs. I kept the biting flies.

I wrapped the bugs around me. Fuck PR. The faint weight of the insects was reassuring, like a blanket. A barrier against the world, like Tecton’s armor or Rachel’s intimidating nature.

A sign caught my eye. I stopped, looking over the people in the small campsite.

Barnes.

No further details, no requests. I almost hadn’t recognized them.

Alan, Emma’s dad, had lost weight since I’d seen him last. He’d noticed me, and looked up, staring, his eyes red. His wife sat in a lawn chair beside him, while Emma’s older sister sat on a blanket at her mother’s feet, her mother resting one hand on her head.

Alan was staring at me now, and there was an inexplicable accusation in the look. His wife took his hand and held it, but he didn’t move his eyes a fraction.

When Anne, Emma’s sister, looked up at me, there was a glimmer of the same. A hint of blame.

Emma hadn’t made it. How? Why? Why could they all leave while Emma wouldn’t be able to? I might have thought Emma had been somewhere out of reach, but that didn’t fit. There would be no certainty she was dead. They’d be putting her name on a sign and hoping she turned up?

And why would they blame me? For failing to stop this from happening?

Fuck that.

I turned and walked away.

Once I was out of their immediate vicinity, I took a few running steps and let my flight pack lift me up. Better than zig-zagging between the campsites.

I floated over a sea of people with their heads down, their expressions alternately emotional and rigidly stoic in defeat. Hundreds or thousands of tents surrounded the area, and string fences no higher than one’s calf bounded off each of the sites.

Rachel had made her way outside the city limits, past even the tents that were set a five or six minute walk from any of the others. I followed her over the hill, to another small set of buildings. Cabins set on what had been Captain’s Hill in Earth Bet. I knew they were Rachel’s because of the dogs that were scattered around the premises, a small crowd milling around Bastard and the other mutant canines.

The largest cabin had three large bison skulls placed over the cabin door. Bastard and the other dogs had been tied up outside like horses, left to shrink, with a trough of water to drink from.

I landed, and I was struck by the realization that my flight pack might not be so easy to recharge, now. I still had the spare, fully charged, but Defiant might have his hands full, and the infrastructure or resources might not be available.

It was a minor thing. Inconsequential, in terms of everything that was going on. It wasn’t like the flight pack was going to matter a bit against Scion. But it was one more reminder of what was truly happening.

I stopped and turned to look over the landscape. I turned my head right until the small settlement and the sea of tents wasn’t quite visible, then turned it to the left to do the same. Focusing on the nature, the untouched wilderness.

Is this what Brockton Bay will look like, if we can’t win this fight? How many years does it take for the last building to collapse, for dirt and grass to drown away any and all signs we were ever there?

It was a daunting thought, a heavy thought that joined countless others.

The dogs barked as I approached on foot. I kept calm and waited.

I recognized the girl with the funny colored eyes and darker skin from Rachel’s hideout. I’d met her on my last week in Brockton Bay. With her presence alone, the animals collectively quieted. A single dog barked one last time, with two others reflexively following with barks of their own, but that ended it. The girl held the door open from me, and the dogs didn’t protest as I made my way inside.

Rachel was sitting on a couch with dogs arranged around her. Angelica was afforded a bit of favoritism, and received a touch of extra attention from her master. She, in turn, was extending a gentleness to Rachel that went beyond Angelica’s poor health and the glacial movements that accompanied chronic pain. Rachel looked defensive, her eyes cast down at the ground. Something more severe than the whole Scion business.

Charlotte, Forrest, and Sierra were present too, keeping their distance, keeping silent as we met again for the first time in over a year and a half, not moving from where they stood.

The kids gathered at the far end of the room, silently occupying themselves with a mass of puppies. I recognized Mason and Kathy, and didn’t recognize Ephraim at first glance. Jessie was conspicuously absent, but nobody seemed to be reacting to that gap. She’d left on her own, maybe. Found family.

Aidan sat off on his own, a pigeon sitting on his knee. He opened and closed his hands, and the bird hopped from the one knee to the other, then back again.Something had happened there, but it wasn’t a focus. Not right now.

Tattletale sat in her computer chair, but the computer screens were dark, the computers themselves unlit, quiet and still.

I didn’t like the emotion I saw on her face any more than I liked what I saw with the others.

Pity. Sympathy.

It wouldn’t be Grue. No. That didn’t fit. He’d been flying back, and he hadn’t been so far away that he’d be in the path of danger.

Not Imp either. Parian and Foil had been fine the last time I’d seen.

No.

Tattletale was best situated to focus on Brockton Bay. Who had made it. Who hadn’t. And there was only one Brockton Bay resident who truly mattered, that hadn’t been accounted for.

I felt a lump in my throat growing with every heartbeat, expanding every time I tried to swallow and failed.

Without waiting for a response, for any words of pity, or even verification, I turned and pushed my way out the door, taking flight.

I flew. Up over the bay, away from the city, away from this alien Earth. I blinded myself with my own swarm, drowned everything out with their drone, their buzz, their roar.

All of this time, the sacrifices, the loss of security.

The loss of me.

To do what? To stop this?

It had happened despite our attempts to the contrary.

To reconnect with my dad?

We had reconnected. I’d come clean about who and what I was. We’d built up a relationship that was new, accounting for the fact that we were changed people. Now, as I continued to fly, to put distance between myself and everything, I wasn’t sure it had been worth it.

The wind blew my hair, and I let my swarm move away, revealing the open ocean all around me. There was only the wind and the sound of the water to hear. The smell of salt water I’d come to miss.

My dad was gone, and I couldn’t bring myself to go back and get verification. I couldn’t handle it if there wasn’t verification.

I was cognizant of the fuel gauge, of the dwindling power of the flight pack. I knew I’d have to go back. I knew there was stuff to do.

But I’d spent the last age trying to build towards something, to prepare for the pivotal moment. I’d played my role, helped stop Hookwolf. I’d communicated with Foil to urge her to play possum, tracking where the enemy was and what they could see. It had led to us taking down Gray Boy and Siberian, trapping Jack.

And now the death toll was climbing. Scion continued his rampage, and I hadn’t even had the guts to own up to the failure.

I couldn’t bring myself to go back and do something minor. It was arrogant, proud, but I couldn’t bring myself to do search and rescue while the population was steadily scoured from the planet, the major cities wiped out like a human child might kick down anthills.

There was nothing in the worlds that I wanted more than a hug and I couldn’t bring myself to ask for one. My dad and Rachel were the only ones I could trust to offer one without further questions, without platitude or commentary, and I couldn’t get to Rachel without going through the others. My dad was even farther from my reach.

The mask I’d erected to see things through to this point was cracking and I couldn’t bear to show anyone my face.

The fuel gauge ticked down. I noted it reaching a critical point, where reaching land before I ran out might be difficult, if not impossible.

The sky was darkening. No clouds, no city lights. A cloud passed over sunset and the moon overhead, and it was startling just how dark things became.

A fluorescent glare cut through the darkness. My hair and my swarm stirred. I could feel the breeze from behind me.

I didn’t turn around.

“Your call,” Tattletale said, her voice quiet. “I’d like you to have my back, but I understand if-”

I shook my head, my hair flying out to either side. I turned around and floated over to the doorway that hung in the air.

I set foot on solid ground, and felt weirdly heavy when I did. It took me a moment to find my balance.

Tattletale caught me as the door closed beside us. Then she wrapped her arms around me in a hug. Odd, that she was shorter than me. When did that happen? I could remember her giving me a one-armed hug once, a long time ago. She’d been just a little taller than me then. Just the right height for a hug. Now we were like Foil and Parian. I was taller, receiving comfort from someone shorter than me.

I’d underestimated her. She didn’t ask any questions or offer any sympathy.

“They’re all here,” she said. “Ready?”

I hesitated, then spoke. My voice was rough. “Ready.”

We didn’t budge. She didn’t break the hug.

“Fuckit all,” I muttered. My voice was still weird with emotion. Maybe I’d keep my mouth shut at this meeting.

“Fuck it,” she agreed.

That said, we broke apart, took a second to breathe, and then made our way into the meeting room.

I had to twist around to look at Crucible. We were in the hallway just outside a set of elevators, windows on one side, doors at either end of the hallway leading into offices. This was something of a waiting game, as Tecton and Revel got their teams into position to support Golem.

Through countless stakeouts, I’d found a routine. Cheating on the ‘can’t do anything but sit there’ rule and reading while my bugs saw to everything else was a part of that routine. I was nestled in between two pillars that sat between clusters of windows, my back against one, one knee propped up, a file in my lap. My cliff notes on the various members of the Nine.

“I wanted to say thanks,” Crucible said, “Appreciate the invite. Hundreds of superpowered lunatics, some of the scariest guys around, and that’s not even the scariest part of all of this! But Chevalier’s all, ‘Weaver specifically asked if you’d help.’ How the hell am I supposed to say no to him?”

“You just say no,” Clockblocker said, before I could respond. “You’re team leader, I’d even argue it’s your job to say no when the situation calls for it. More than leading the team, more than strategy or handling double the paperwork or attending the meetings. You decide what jobs are out of your team’s depth and you tell the bosses to go fuck themselves, in the politest terms possible.”

“It’s Chevalier. Important guy.”

“And when we asked you if you were okay with me taking command, that was your opportunity to say no. His rank doesn’t matter. He’d probably respect you more if you told him your team wasn’t prepared and then stuck to your guns.”

“You didn’t tell anyone to go fuck themselves,” Crucible said.

“No. And I agreed to help out with this because this is important. My old teammates have been preparing for this in their own time, and-”

“-And you’ve got a thing for Weaver,” the Ward I hadn’t yet met said. It was a girl, flanked by five shadowy silhouettes of herself, who were sitting around her on the other side of the hallway. I’d read up on her, and I knew her as Toggle. The ‘baby’ of the team, it seemed, at fourteen. She held what looked like a mace, but it, along with the layered body armor she wore, had circles of light glowing in shifting colors.

There was a long, awkward silence. I glanced at Clockblocker, but he appeared unfazed. Not that I could really tell. His armor still had animated clock faces digitally displayed on the open spaces, and there was one in the middle of his face. Was the varying speed and position of the hands supposed to indicate something, or was I reading too much into it?

“That was a joke,” Toggle said.

“I’m not dignifying it with a response,” Clockblocker said.

“Clocksie’s sweet on Weaver,” Imp said. “Aww.”

“Clocksie,” Clockblocker said, deadpan, “Has been the target of a lot of criticism, because he was in charge of the Wards at the time a lot of stuff went down. Some dingbats online speculated that I had a thing for Weaver, and it took off. The people online like to find stuff that fills in blanks, and there were a hell of a lot of blanks around the whole thing with Weaver defecting, and our pseudo-truce with the Undersiders.”

“They latched onto the idea,” I said.

“Yep.”

“Sorry,” I told him.

“Not your fault, not exactly. The city’s pretty peaceful, pretty safe, and nobody even hints about why, but people know. My bosses know why, and that means my career might never recover. The only thing keeping things remotely interesting is the challenge of trying to get to any new bad guys before the Undersiders do, to enforce real justice instead of vigilante scare tactics-”

“We’re awesomely good at the scare tactics though,” Imp cut in.

Clockblocker ignored her. “-Except we barely even get to do that, because Tattletale’s always a few steps ahead. Then, to top it all off, I hear about the Weaver-Clockblocker thing every single day, to the point that it’s sad. Salt in a wound.”

“Don’t worry. Clockblocker used to be the funny one,” Vista said. “Now he’s the asshole grown up that tears the funny kid to shreds.”

Clockblocker didn’t respond to that. Instead, he shifted the device he’d been wearing on his back against the wall and sat down between the elevators.

Waiting on my lonesome was easier.

My bugs crawled all around the exterior of our target. The buildings in this town were smallish, the tallest being five stories, and this contingent of the Nine had chosen it as their destination.

Not a single gap. They’d barely had any time, but they had hermetically sealed the structure, containing themselves and every single resident within. The windows and doors had been sprayed with something red that trickled out of cracks only to harden. My bugs explored cracks in the foundation, and found that same vaguely tacky, amber-like barrier blocking the openings where they should have been able to enter the building.

Doors, windows, cracks, vents, all protected.

I could estimate seven apartments per floor. One on the ground floor, for the building manager. Assuming they weren’t bachelor apartments, that suggested fifty-five to sixty people in total, trapped within, along with hostages and an unknown number and composition of the Nine.

“I have to ask,” I said, not looking in Clockblocker’s direction, “This end of the world thing. The way you talk about the future, life beyond this supposed apocalypse event. Can you do that because you’re optimistic, or because you don’t think it’ll happen?”

“I do it because I have to. You can’t stay sane, thinking it’s all going to end soon. There has to be something beyond it. If you get to that point and then we figure out a way to resolve it, then what happens after that? You need a real life.”

“If you get to that point and you’ve plotted out the rest of your life, and we lose, then aren’t you going to be devastated?” I asked.

“The wrong power in the wrong hands,” Kid Win said. He’d reconfigured the outside of his suit so the armored upper body folded down into a pair of gauntlets, allowing him to walk forward like a gorilla, the two halves acting as massive fingerless gauntlets. It wasn’t pretty, and it left his head and upper body more exposed, but it let him maneuver inside. He seemed to muse a second, then agreed, “Yeah.”

Interesting to see the divide, I thought. The veteran members vs. the newer ones.

“See, I don’t think it’s the wrong power in the wrong hands,” Clockblocker said. “I think it’s a joke. Humanity destroys itself, and all these powers, they just open the door to let it happen. It’s not going to be some villain overlord or even a monster like Jack who does it. I’m more liable to believe the world ends because of some deluded, fat, pimply faced punk kid that lives off pizza and mountain dew. There’s no damn point to it, but sometimes I look at the idiots, the selfish assholes and the maniacs that fill this world and I think that’s all we deserve.”

“I like your line of thinking,” Imp said. “The world gets destroyed by some loser who jacks off twelve times a day to the freakiest, nastiest parahumans.”

“Thank you,” Clockblocker said. “For so eloquently demonstrating what I was saying about us deserving it.”

“No problemo,” Imp said.

“That doesn’t exist, does it?” Toggle asked. “Case fifty-three porn?”

“Everything exists,” Kid Win said.

“Um, it just hit me. When you were saying we deserve it, were you talking about pimple-face the world destroying freak-fetishist or were you talking about me?”

I shut my eyes and tuned out the conversation. It was good that they were talking, staying calm, more or less getting along.

Grue and Rachel arrived from the stairwell.

“Anything?” Imp asked.

“No,” Grue said.

“The Red Hands leave already?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Grue said. “Listen, about all that, it’s-”

I raised my hand to stop him. “Not important. Not a big deal. I was only going to ask if maybe Crucible or Toggle could be taken along. It’s a way out, now that things are getting heavier.”

“No. It’s fine, I’ll stay,” Crucible said.

“Ditto.”

I nodded, then looked at Grue, shrugging. “That’s all.”

“We’re okay?”

“Copacetic,” I said, turning my attention back to the file. Skinslip.

I reread the page four times before I was sufficiently distracted and able to register what I was reading.

Rachel directed her dogs to watch the stairwell, then crossed to the middle of the hallway to me. She sat with her back to the same pillar I had my back to, her shoulder pressing against mine, squishing me a little bit further into the crevice I’d settled in. Not uncomfortable. Or it was, but the body contact was comforting enough that it didn’t bother me. It was reassuring without being in my face or distracting me from my study of the folder.

All stuff I’d read backwards and forwards, but I couldn’t focus on a book, and refreshers could only help.

I turned the page. Night Hag.

“How’s life on the dark side?” Kid Win asked.

I turned my head. He was talking to Foil, who sat at the furthest point from the stairwell.

“More wholesome than you’d think,” Foil said. “Playing into every stereotype ever, moving in before we’d even been on a date, but it’s nice.”

“Nice?” Clockblocker said. “Not what I expected. Not that I’m not happy for you, but-”

She shifted position, resting her head on Parian’s shoulder. “It’s… free. Pleasant. The times between the fights with the brain-shatteringly terrifying god-monsters, anyways. Cooking breakfast, having breakfast cooked for you, going on walks with the dogs, maybe a bit of bodyguard duty while Parian handles a meeting, whatev, picnic for lunch, patrol the territory, do stuff for my University course, whoever didn’t cook breakfast makes dinner…”

Just like that, the mood shifted. Everyone was standing, picking up the equipment they’d put down. The joking atmosphere was gone, the… not peace, but the stillness, it was broken. Nerves were suddenly on edge, the opportunity to joke and comment gone.

“Scouting with the bugs didn’t turn up anything,” I said. “Place is sealed. Vista, we’ll be counting on you to give us an in.”

She nodded.

“We’re going in blind. We suspect there’s at least two Mannequins, but that’s it. Mannequin specializes in indirect attacks. Catching people off guard, while being durable and flexible enough that he can escape from any situation that doesn’t go his way. I hope the rest of you have read up on the other members of the Nine, past and present.”

“Will do,” Parian said. She was already inflating a stuffed scorpion. Cloth bound around one of Foil’s bolts to help form a tail.

“Grue,” I said. “Hit the building, inside and out, but leave the inside clear. With luck, we can shut off their communications. With more luck, you can get a bead on what powers we’re dealing with.”

He nodded.

With that, we were down the stairs and out the front door.

A joint attack maximized the chaos and minimized the chance of reinforcements. Golem was attacking the other location. Ten members of the Nine there. Ten here?

If so, that was a big step up from the last fight. From four or five to twenty.

Grue used his power, surrounding the area. Slowly but surely, the area was consumed in darkness. Not just Grue’s power, but the fact that the massive cloud of darkness was blocking out the ambient light. Though he kept the smoke out of the center of the area, it grew darker with every passing second.

I joined the Brockton Bay Wards as they switched on flashlights, both handheld and gun-mounted ones. Each of us flicked on the smaller lights that were part of our masks or helmets. The latter were feeble at best, but it was still light. Mine came from smaller lenses that sat around the larger ones that covered my eyes. They filtered out as a faint blue. The pattern and color would hopefully make me more identifiable.

“It’s kind of dumb that we don’t have those things,” Imp commented.

“Perk of being a hero,” Clockblocker said. He handed her a spare flashlight.

I gave one to Rachel, but she didn’t turn it on. Instead, she slid the loop over her wrist, hopping onto her dog’s back.

The walls of darkness that surrounded the structure connected at the very top, and we were plunged into the deep sort of darkness one might expect from being a thousand feet underground. The headlamps and flashlights were the only real light, making it look almost as if the exposed pavement, sidewalk and the foot of the building were the only things that remained in the world.

Vista used her power as we got closer. I could see a depression appearing in the wall, as if a giant, invisible finger were pressing into it.

A hole appeared, and a small explosion tore out through the space, opening the hole wider. We staggered, and some of our smaller members were even thrown to the ground.

Pale mist cleared slowly as we got to our feet. My bugs scanned the area, searching for threats who might have been alerted to our presence.

And the explosion… there was a byproduct. Or maybe it was the source. A small glacier had formed around the hole, jagged, as if water had spewed forth and immediately frozen.

“The hell?” Clockblocker muttered.

Good thing it wasn’t Tecton knocking down the wall, I thought.

Vista tried again, higher up, on the fourth story, off to the far side.

We were braced for the detonation this time. I kept bugs close to get a sense of what was going on. The moment there was a gap, the air rushed out, cold and wet, and was followed soon after by a crushing manifestation of a small iceberg.

It creaked, a long, drawn out sound, then cracked abruptly. The iceberg came free, and the resulting gap was almost instantaneously filled by a third detonation. A chunk of ice the size of a large car dropped to the street and shattered into a million individual fragments.

Or maybe Tecton would be an asset here. How the fuck do we break into this?

“Has to be Mannequin,” I said. “Or Sphere. Used to specialize in closed systems. It makes sense, on a level, but this isn’t in Mannequin’s usual repertoire. Maybe they stole it from… what was the name? Toybox tinker, Gelid? Glace, that’s it.”

“A cloned tinker is the smallest threat,” Clockblocker said. “Takes them time to build, and if you figure Jack didn’t exactly save anything of his, and… well, I don’t even know how they replaced memories, but there’s no way he’s just going to pick up where he left off.”

“Mannequin in a different vein,” I said. “Same psychosis, different direction taken?”

“Looks like, doesn’t it?”

I frowned.

“We could wait for the ice to melt,” Imp suggested. “Warm out.”

“Would take forever,” Vista said.

“And it would only get replaced, probably,” Clockblocker said.

“Go big?” I suggested. “Whatever’s producing the ice, there’s got to be a limit in terms of materials.”

Vista nodded.

This time, rather than a depression, it was a line, running from one corner at the bottom of the building to the opposite corner on the top.

It took ten or fifteen seconds, and then the ice blasted out, barely visible with only our flashlights to illuminate it.

Nothing. Ground to roof, the ice remained.

“I could do it again,” Vista suggested.

“Faster to get Kid Win to just tear the outside of the building apart,” Clockblocker said. “Not like they don’t know we’re here, now.”

“I’m thinking,” I said. “You know that draft of cool air you feel when the automatic doors of a big-name store swing open?”

“Sure,” Clockblocker said.

“It’s designed like that, to use air pressure and air flow and whatever else to keep bugs and debris out.”

“Of course you know that,” Imp said. “Because of the bugs.”

“I looked into it when I started paying attention to places where there aren’t a lot of bugs, to see why. There’s sonic countermeasures, and there’s that.”

“Whatever,” Imp said. “Still pretty random.”

“This is the same thing, except it’s weaponized. Or made into a defense system, depending on how you want to look at it. I’d bet most of the building is rigged with some crazy high pressure, as well as whatever devices he’s got that are detonating on exposure to the outside.”

“Okay, with you so far,” Clockblocker said.

“But where are they keeping the hostages? Option one is that they’ve got them in some sealed area, like they stuck Cherish into, and all of the Nine members in the building are immune to that pressure and cold. Multiple Mannequins, maybe a Siberian in a sealed case?”

“What’s option two?” Grue asked.

“The inside is safe. Apartments or offices bordering on exterior walls would be pressurized, but the interior walls, all of the rooms of the building that aren’t rigged, they’d be safe, with hostages and the Nine inside.”

Clockblocker nodded. “Makes sense, but that’s a lot of speculation.”

“Theory two is a lot easier to prove,” I said. “We either need to go in through the top, and hope the roof isn’t as protected-”

Shuffle could have done that, I thought. Had we sent the wrong teams to the wrong locations? It had sounded like there was a hell of a lot of offensive power at the other location.

“I’ll try,” Vista said. “Hold on.”

This was a more refined use of her power. She drew on the exterior of the building, and created a depression, but the goal this time wasn’t to create a hole. She extended the depression inward, but she fed enough of the surrounding material into it to keep the resulting walls intact.

It stopped, and she merged it into another wall. I couldn’t see the wall, but I could sense it with my bugs. To my eyes, it was a black void, a hole too deep for my bugs to reach.

She paused, then began opening an experimental hole in the far wall. I pulled my bugs back to make it easier for her.

I could feel the warm air blow past my bugs. I could smell it using their senses. An alien sensation, but I noted the scent of blood, the acrid chemical odor of the sealing materials.

We waited as he pumped the building full of darkness. My bugs made their way through, scanning the surroundings.

“Murder Rat,” Grue said. “Three of her. I can… kind of sense what others are sensing around me, and there’s a glimmer of something that might be a teleportation power. I don’t trust myself to use it without any ability to sense where I’m going. Breeds… And… I can’t even get a bead on this guy’s powers.”

Was it? I could sense figures moving throughout the darkness, but they were swift, and moved in unpredictable directions. The elevator shaft’s doors had been opened, and they climbed up and through with no difficulty. There were countless people, hanging from the ceiling by chains, countless pieces of armor, as though Mannequin was trying to reinvent his own gear, and then on the penthouse level…

A man, easily eight feet tall, muscular and broad-shouldered, sitting at a computer chair with one foot propped up on a desk. His chest was bare, his pants no doubt a normal size, but rendered skintight by his sheer mass, left unzipped. He was watching something violent on a laptop as he sat there. The hostages who weren’t strung up with chains were in the room, cowering behind him as a full cluster. In the midst of them, there was something that looked like a coffin.

“That’s one. Jesus, that’s a rush. The other… I think it’s the sort of power you need the built-in second sense to grasp.”

“That has to be Hatchet Face. I guess you can use his power nullification,” I said, “That’s something, if we hit a pinch. I just don’t understand this other power. Bonesaw’s work? A hybrid?”

Grue nodded. “Possible.”

I frowned. “Not sure how to do this. If we entered through the top floor, we could access the hostages right away, defeat Hatchet Face.”

“Sounds good,” Clockblocker said.

“Except… what do the rest do?” I asked. “Some signal goes off, or they realize something’s up… they’re not fighting types, not exactly. They’re assassins, indirect attackers. They wouldn’t just converge on us. I don’t know how they’d react, and it’s not the kind of situation where I can say that in a good way.”

“We need to make a call soon,” Grue said. “You said the other team is already attacking?”

“I thought this would be simpler,” I said. “Let’s go in the ground floor. Clear each floor, block off escape routes, so they can’t just exit the building and go wreak mayhem elsewhere, or notify Jack. They can fall back to the main room where Hatchet Face is waiting, and-”

“And then we’ve got a hell of a fight on our hands,” Grue said. “Against enemies with hostages.”

“Cornered rats with hostages,” Vista said. The little of her face I could see in the flashlight-illuminated gloom was somber.

“Ground floor,” I said. “If nothing else, it buys us time to think of something before we reach a crisis point. The alternative… I don’t like the idea that so many of these guys could escape. They’ve bottled themselves up nicely. Stay on your guard.”

“Are you staying outside?” Clockblocker asked me.

I shook my head. “Need to maintain communications against this team, and I don’t like how long it would take to communicate using my bugs, or the chance you could get cut off. I’ll come with, help watch your backs.”

Rachel had kept the dogs at a smaller size so they could patrol the building we’d been hiding out in. It meant they were big, but not so big that they filled the entire hallway. They passed through the corridor Vista had made without trouble.

We filed in, shoulder to shoulder, and I did what I could to track the various villains in the building. Grue dissipated the darkness as we got close enough to the respective areas to shine our flashlights on the objects in question.

Ominous, being in the midst of this building, almost like being in a submarine. There was an incredible, devastating pressure all around us. A leak meant a possible terminal end to all of us. The darkness was oppressive, and every surface was covered in the red sealant, scabrous, hard, removing the human touch from everything around us.

I was so caught up in it that I nearly missed it. A figure in the ducts.

“There,” I said, keeping my voice low. I pointed.

Our side turned to look.

Mannequin, I thought. I immediately switched mental gears. Who to protect, what to do tactically.

I hit the briefest stumbling block when the recollection of what Clockblocker had been talking about crossed my mind. Why does he remember his suit?

The same outfit, with alterations. The all-concealing, all-protecting shell surrounding his body, even the joints.

Bastard lunged for him, jaws snapping shut, but the Mannequin cartwheeled back and away.

Vista fired her gun, sending a single green spark zipping ahead. Mannequin swayed to one side, bending his body at impossible angles to avoid the shot. The bullet hit the wall, then briefly flared, disintegrating a scab-covered vending machine.

Lines exploded forward from Clockblocker’s hands, one from each finger, and the Mannequin staggered back. The narrow cables flew past him, glanced off his armor to ricochet into the surrounding area, and one or two even managed to wind around his arm or leg.

Clockblocker used his power, freezing the Mannequin in place.

“Vista,” he said, “Another shot!”

She still had her gun leveled at Mannequin. She aimed-

And the Mannequin let a blade spring from his palm. It punched through the wall at the very edge of our tunnel.

Ice exploded into the interior of the hallway, consuming the Mannequin entirely.

Vista dropped her gun.

“No escape route,” Crucible said.

“Can’t shoot without putting us at risk,” Vista said. “I can make another exit, but it’s going to take a minute.”

We had to walk around in a semicircle before we found ourselves by the elevators and stairwells of the lobby. The stairwell was framed by two bodies, hung by their feet. No wounds were visible.

I felt with my bugs, and I could sense warmth from them. Still alive.

Breed.

What were we even supposed to do with his victims?

For the second time in as many minutes, I found myself saying, “We deal with them after.”

We entered the stairwell. I was aware of a Murder Rat popping in on the ground floor, crawling on hands and feet that each had excessively long blades on the ends. She moved faster than she should have been able to, considering her means of locomotion, but she had an exceedingly strong, flexible body. Enhanced senses, too, with her conical nose close to the ground, long greasy hair brushing against the surface. I almost turned back to deal with her, but she was already gone, moving faster than my bugs could.

Claustrophobic. I was acutely aware of the dimensions of the space, the fact that only a fraction of the building could actually hold people. Of that portion of the building interior, the elevator shafts took up an awful lot of space.

Their territory, really.

The stairs hadn’t received as much of the ‘scab’ treatment, but they were still treacherous ground. The stairs blocked our view of what was above or below us. I was careful to check for threats every step of the way, watching doors, sweeping over surfaces, all too aware that Mannequin had evaded my bugs before.

Had this one somehow retained the lessons the original had learned? I could use thread to cover more ground, spread out my bugs.

An air vent at the very top floor was punched free of the wall. My bugs could sense the long claws, the conical nose. They started chewing on her, devouring and biting, but her skin was tough, as though most of it was scar tissue. I could feel the hot air as she rapidly inhaled and exhaled.

“Murder Rat, she’s on the top-”

She pushed herself free of the vent, lunging, drawing her claws together as if she were diving into water from a height. Her narrow, emaciated body slipped right between the railings of the ascending and descending stairs.

“Incoming!” I shouted. I pushed the others back as I could reach them. The only ones in reach were Rachel and Crucible.

She reached the stairwell just above us and kicked off it, changing her orientation and the trajectory of her dive. She slammed into the largest, most obvious target -Grue- all of her claw-tips drawn together into one long spike.

He was thrown against the walls and the stairs, and his tumble down the stairs just below him drove him into Toggle and Vista, who nearly fell down the stairs along with him.

Murder Rat was still on top of him, shifting the movements of her limbs to remain more or less upright as she perched on his body. Her head cocked quizzically. The blades hadn’t penetrated.

And then she kicked the wall, drawing her shoulders together as she slid between Clockblocker’s legs, her nose pointed at the gap in the railing.

Clockblocker shifted his foot to make contact with the long blades at her toes, touching her, and froze her in place.

“My face,” Vista whispered.

“Put pressure on it,” Crucible said. His own face was bleeding badly, but he didn’t even seem to notice.

And, more troubling, the wound was smoking. Murder Rat’s power.

I turned my attention to Grue. “Are you hurt?”

“No. I… shit, how did that not break a rib?”

I shook my head. Still using the costume I made, and it saved your life.

He accepted my help in standing. I turned my attention to the Brockton Bay Wards, but there were too many people crowded there for me to jump in and help. I focused on the other threats.

I could sense the others swarming around us, on stairs above and below. I drew out lines of silk to stop them from using the same approach this Murder Rat had managed.

For extra measure, I tied thread around the frozen Murder Rat’s throat, tying it to the railing.

She was a composite of two ‘kitchen sink’ capes. Mouse Protector and Ravager. Two primary powers that had blended into the one, a dozen other minor powers. Flexibility, a bizarre kind of enhanced strength, reflexes and agility that had peaks and valleys, and skin as tough as leather.

“I kind of like the smell,” Vista said, her words muffled by the hand Crucible was pressing to her face. “Hey, this’ll be a badass scar, huh?”

“Quiet,” Clockblocker said.

I could hear another Murder Rat on the stairs below us. She let her claw drag on the wall, and the metal on concrete made a sound like five nails on a chalkboard. Loud, slowly increasing in volume as she approached us.

I set my bugs on her. She persisted, simply enduring what they were doing to her. I tried to go for the tiny eyes that were nearly buried behind her altered face and brow, but she shut them, relying on touch and smell to move. I started to pack bugs around her nose and mouth, and found that slowed her just a fraction.

But the noise continued. I could see the effect it was having on the others.

A rattling noise from above, joined by another nails-on-blackboard screech. A Mannequin, using the blades he’d extended from his forearms to scrape the wall and hit the individual bars that held the railing up at chest level, the same bars that the Murder Rat had tried to slip between to make her escape.

“It burns,” Vista said. Her fingers raised to the mark that ran from the side of her chin to her cheekbone.

“The meds?” Clockblocker asked.

“The smoke. Stinging my eyes, and feels like it’s fizzing. I read the file, this is her power, right? It’s what she does?”

“It’s going to take a long time to heal,” Clockblocker said. “Pretty much guarantees a scar. But we stopped the bleeding, which is better than most get.”

The dog growled as another Murder Rat joined the fray, her clawed feet clicking against the steps as she made her descent, the screeches of her claws against the concrete joining what was quickly becoming a cacophony. The blades at the fingertips of her other hand struck the bars of the railing, which set them to ringing.

Then, from the first and fourth floors, I could sense Breed’s minions make their approach. In the midst of the banging and screeching, their hissing was almost impossible to make out.

One more Mannequin hung back, letting the little bastards climb on him. They were smallish. Smaller than the ones in Killington had been.

I shifted my weight, ready for one of them to make an attack at any moment. Indirect attacks, surprise attacks, all from directions that were hard to anticipate.

“They don’t sense things like we do. My bugs aren’t going to do much either,” I said. “Laying tripwires and trying to bind them here and there, but these aren’t guys my bugs can sting.”

“So?” Rachel asked.

“We die,” Imp said, with an odd cheerfulness. “Horribly, gruesomely. They’ll break or sever our arms and legs and cap them with Mannequin’s stuff so we don’t bleed out, and then they’ll let Breed’s bugs devour us from the inside out.”

“Not helping, Imp,” Grue said.

“I’m only saying what we already know. Kind of counterproductive, morale-wise, to have us read all the dossiers on these bastards.”

“Yeah. Just a little,” Crucible agreed.

“Why are we waiting here?” Rachel asked, her voice a little too loud. “Why don’t we just fucking attack them?”

I didn’t have a good rebuttal to that.

No, that wasn’t right. I had a dozen rebuttals. That these guys would take any offensive action on our part as an excuse to slip past us and murder our more vulnerable members.

But I didn’t have a better strategy. Not one I was eager to use so prematurely.

“Attack,” I said. “Now.”

Rachel whistled, a long sharp sound that cut through the various noises the Nine’s members had created. There was only silence as the whistle echoed through the stairwell.

She snapped her fingers and pointed up the stairs, snapped again and pointed down.

Mannequin would be fireproof, though. Even an extreme heat like Crucible could create wouldn’t have an effect. Still, it meant one was contained.

Yet as soon as we captured one, another slipped the net. The Murder Rat Clockblocker had frozen animated again, slipping through the railing, only to find herself hanging by her throat, a silk cord binding her. My bugs could sense blood trickling, but the movement suggested her neck hadn’t snapped.

Two ways she’d escape. The first was obvious, cutting the cord.

The second?

“Vista, Crucible!” I hollered their names.

They whipped around to face me, saw me holding my knife, ready to drive it forward.

The smoke on Vista’s face flared, blossoming like a smoke grenade that had just gone off, and Murder Rat materialized, one claw already poised with the points facing upward, ready to drive upward into Vista’s unprotected jawline.

I’d seen her gesture as she hung on the rope, in preparation for her materialization. I had to lunge forward, striking the stairs with the boniest parts of my shins to catch the villain’s wrist with my free hand, pulling her off-balance.

She rolled with it, almost doing a backflip as she threw one leg back to drive a point towards Imp’s scalp. Grue caught Murder Rat’s leg, and between us, we held her. I punched the blade into her throat.

Grue heaved her over the railing. He covered our retreat with darkness, then lunged ahead of the group. Murder Rat’s powers, it seemed.

Reckless, not like him, but he joined the front lines, where Bastard was giving two Mannequins a hard time.

Clockblocker threw out lines of silk, then froze them. The dog lunged, and the Mannequins were sandwiched between the dog and the silk.

Blood spurted at the dog’s shoulder where the lines had made contact. One Mannequin lost an arm, but they both managed to contort and angle themselves so they could slip over, under or between the threads.

Of course it wouldn’t be easy. Fuck.

“Back!” Rachel called out, before the dog decided to charge through the cables Clockblocker had used. The dog retreated a pace. Grue only hopped up, grabbing the railing, managed a grip, and then descended on them. He grabbed one and flung it towards the wires.

It only contorted, arching its back like a high jumper to slip through a gap. It got halfway before Bastard closed his jaws on his upper body.

Shit. My bugs were so useless here. I couldn’t go after the Breeds until I knew which of the people in the building were them. The original Breed had died when someone had hit a building with an incendiary missile, and the bugs had stopped appearing. He wasn’t altered in appearance. For all respects, he was just an ordinary man.

Besides the whole ‘I create horrifying space bugs’ thing.

The Mannequin that crawled with Breed’s creations leaped down, only to get caught in more strands. He started to cut his way free, but Vista opened fire. Her shots glanced off his outer shell.

The creatures, though, fell through the gaps. More than a handful landed in our midst.

“I thought you said they don’t go after people!”

“They don’t!” I said. “So long as there’s other food sources available.” I kicked at one as it advanced on my right foot.

“There are dozens of bodies here!”

Already infected, I realized. These parasites were seeking fresh hosts, ones not already occupied by anything.

I caught the ones I could with my own bugs, used thread to haul them free, but there were twenty, and their dozens of legs were sharp, capable of punching through flesh and clothing to maintain a grip. Difficult to dislodge.

One had landed on my shoulder. I tried to pull it free and failed, stabbed at the legs with my knife, only for it to fold them into its carapace. It lashed at the lens of my mask with its spike-tipped tail. It didn’t penetrate, and rolled off my shoulder before I could get a hold on it.

Its legs extended, and it found a grip on my flight pack. In an instant, it was racing up towards my head again. It stopped twice, pausing for one second as it transitioned from my flight pack to my costume, then stopping again as it reached the area where the mask and body of my costume overlapped at my neck. The needle points of its legs were pricking through the fabric of my costume, no doubt as it tried to find a way under. I got a grip on its tail, but failed to dislodge it. Too slick.

The others weren’t faring a lot better. Crucible shouted something incoherent as he used both hands to stop a softball sized creature from advancing on his mouth. Its millipede-like limbs left bloody tracks in his skin as it made excruciating progress towards the orifice.

It was a critical distraction as we were dealing with highly mobile foes. A Murder Rat leaped up to find a grip on the underside of the stairs we were standing on, then vaulted herself to one side and up, slipping between the bars and into our midst.

Rachel whistled, hard, and the dog from downstairs came barreling through our group. We were knocked aside, pushed to the ground by the dog’s mass as it charged Murder Rat. She leaped up, stepping on the dog’s back, then jumped back down to the lower end of the flight of stairs.

The dog growled and turned around, preparing to charge through us again.

“Hold,” Rachel said. She had to pull off her jacket to access the trilobite-parasite bastard thing that was crawling on the small of her back, heading south. Toggle struck it with her baton, and lights flared.

Imp stepped up just in front of Crucible, impaling the bug on his face with her own knife.

Progress, but we were still in the midst of a lot of dangerous enemies. Elusive ones. Of the six here, we’d only achieved two kills.

“Tattletale here.”

“In an ugly spot,” I said.

“Help’s on the way.”

“Help?”

“Eidolon. We tried to keep things quiet, keep everything off the radar, but he caught on. Legend’s at the other site with Pretender.”

“Turn them away!” I hissed the words.

“Um, not about to turn away help,” Imp said. She was benefiting as Crucible created his superheated forcefield dome to burn away the Breed-parasites too dumb to walk around.

“Turn them away,” I repeated myself. “All three.”

More of Breed’s bugs were starting to make their way to us, from above and below. One Murder Rat, one Mannequin, and the guy upstairs we still hadn’t even interacted with.

With his fucked up coffin.

“I can’t get in touch with them. Not like their number is in the phone book.”

“Contact Cauldron?” I used my swarm to attack the Breed-bugs, but it was slow going. Twenty bugs with strong mandibles could kill one, but it took a minute, maybe two, before they reached something resembling soft tissue.

“No go.”

I could sense him, now, approaching the building cautiously. He used a laser to pierce the roof. Ice blossomed out to fill the gap, a glacier in summer.

I began drawing from the bugs outside, forming a swarm-clone. Eidolon ignored it, firing again. Multiple blasts, multiple creations of ice. He swore under his breath.

Rachel’s dog leaped over us to attack the Murder Rat. She slipped to one side, and a wound at Toggle’s shoulder began blossoming with smoke.

The Murder Rat appeared in our midst. Clockblocker was quick enough to tag her this time.

It wasn’t the most ideal maneuver. Grue’s stolen power disappeared in that same instant. Bad timing – he was in the midst of fighting the Mannequins. One had been taken out by Bastard, but another had joined the fray as it brought the bugs down.

Grue reached out for another power. Mannequin’s power wasn’t useful, but the other-.

I felt my power fading, just as the swarm-decoy was gaining enough bulk.

I wasn’t the only one. Crucible’s forcefield shorted out. Clockblocker had been in the midst of reaching for Breed-bugs to lock down, and found himself only giving them easier access in climbing up his arms.

The Mannequin staggered back, tripping on the stairs. Just a little less coordinated.

Still, it wasn’t useful. One dog was entirely disabled, crawling with countless Breed-parasites. Only the fact that it clenched its jaw kept them from getting in its mouth, but its nose-

“Cancel it, Grue!” I shouted.

He didn’t. Instead, he reached down to grab Mannequin by the throat. He ascended the stairs three at a time, dragging two struggling Mannequins with him.

A bad situation was turning into a nightmare. My radius shrank to a mere hundred feet, then fifty.

Twenty.

The bugs were crawling on us, Crucible wasn’t the only one struggling to keep them from worming beneath his hands and into his mouth.

Then he was gone, the radius of his power nullification too small. If the Hatchet Face upstairs was a hybrid, Grue’s copy of his power was a fraction of a half of a power.

Still, he seemed to have Hatchet Face’s strength and durability.

Our powers began to return, and with the threats of the other capes dealt with, we were free to focus on stopping them.

Clockblocker paused the most dangerous ones, closest to mouths, anuses and private parts, to ears and nostrils. We backed away as he freed us of the worst of them, and Crucible barred the path with his superheated forcefield.

“I’m not… I’m not useful,” Toggle said.

“Different threats, you would be,” Crucible said. “Fuck, this stings.”

“Medical treatment after,” Clockblocker said. “One more to take down.”

We hurried up the stairs. Two flights to the penthouse floor.

“Eidolon,” my swarm-clone spoke.

“Weaver.” He had created a kind of portal and was widening it. It seemed slow, inefficient.

“Go home, Eidolon. You aren’t a help here.”

“I’m to take orders from the one who murdered Alexandria?”

“Yes. Leave. You’re more danger than help.”

“I can end this.”

“So can I. I will end this. Your choice as to how. Do I handle this situation myself, or do I have to kill you, then handle this myself?”

There was only silence from him. He stared at my swarm-clone.

“You dare make that threat, after killing my comrade-in-arms?”

“I do. If there’s a trace of doubt in your mind that I could do it-”

“Your bugs couldn’t touch me.”

Inside the building, we were approaching the penthouse floor.

“Your power is dying. It’s obvious enough that people are speculating on it online, in the media. How Eidolon isn’t as strong as he was in the early days. Why aren’t you inside already? Are you so sure that your power would stop me?”

“I’m here to help. That’s all. Attacking me now would be like the violation of the Endbringer Truce.”

“You’re one of the biggest dangers, Eidolon. Jack’s supposed to be the catalyst for an event, a great catastrophe. Are you honestly telling me that there’s no danger here? That you’re absolutely certain that you don’t have a weakness he could capitalize on?”

Eidolon didn’t speak.

“Don’t tell me you don’t. That you aren’t potentially powerful enough to end the world if it came down to it. If he somehow opened that floodgate-”

“It won’t come to that. I control my powers.”

“Or played a head-game with you? Are you telling me your mind is a fortress? That you don’t have that capacity for great evil inside you?”

“I’m not evil.”

“You participated in business that people felt was so horrifying that they seceded from the Protectorate. How many thousands died or suffered gruesome transformations because of the atrocities Cauldron committed?”

Inside the building, we opened the door. Grue was staring down the last member of this particular group of Nine. Tall, muscular in the way that suggested he was in his physical prime, with a wild mop of dark hair. He was masculine in a way that exaggerated the qualities to a fault, with an overly square jaw, massive hands, an almost Neanderthal brow. It made him look like a bad guy from an old animated film about princesses. As if echoing that sentiment, a word was tattooed across his chest.

Tyrant.

I recognized the other half of the pair. Hatchet Face and King together.

Untouchable. King’s power took any physical harm he suffered and transferred it among his pawns. People he’d touched within the last twenty-four hours. Hatchet Face’s power meant we couldn’t even use abilities to circumvent it. Tyrant here had the enhanced strength each of the two had possessed, the enhanced durability.

“Are you saying you’re blameless, little murderer?” Eidolon asked, just above us. “That you don’t have a potential for evil?”

“No,” I answered. The hybrid crossed the room, and I could feel my powers fading. Grue’s darkness dissipated around the building, and light streamed in through the red windows, casting a tint over everything.

I shifted my bugs outside the building.

“No, I know I have some ugliness inside me,” I spoke through my swarm. My swarm was dissipating, my focus and control over my bugs failing. I had to maintain the formation.

“Then what qualifies you to be here when I can’t?”

“Maybe arrogant of me to say so,” I said. The swarm was quieter as my fine control swiftly dissolved. “But I’ve recognized that ugliness, and I’ve got it harnessed.”

I gave the signal, gesturing for emphasis. Tyrant paused. The swarms outside the building shifted in the same moment, uttering the word faintly.

Now.

Outside the building, Foil fired, and she used the line I’d drawn out with my bugs for guidance. Not perfect, not ungodly straight, but the thread I’d drawn out helped.

There was a concentrated explosion of ice at the edge of the penthouse as the shot punctured the wall, passed within a foot of Tyrant.

He advanced, and I stepped forward to meet him, my eyes on his. My power was almost entirely gone. Dampened to the point that it was just me and the bugs that crawled on me. Every step he took reduced it another fraction. Half a foot, then an inch away from my skin…

Another bolt, between us, closer to Tyrant than to me.

And then an explosion that seemed to shake the entire building. Everyone present was thrown to the ground.

Kid Win had blasted a hole in the side of the penthouse, firing what had to be every single weapon at the same time. Ice was swelling from the open area in fits and starts.

But it was enough of an opening for Foil to get a clear shot.

She shot Tyrant, and the bolt pierced his brain.

He collapsed onto his hands and knees, then staggered, starting to rise.

Another bolt through the spine.

A third through the heart.

He collapsed onto his face.

Foil’s bolts broke the rules. Apparently his power didn’t work on them.

I slowly climbed to my feet, then stared up through the closing hole in the building at Eidolon.

“Go home,” I called out.

He was still, hovering there. I didn’t break eye contact as he floated closer to me, until he stood only a few feet away.

“Sit this one out, for all of our sakes.”

He broke eye contact first. His eyes fell on Foil and Kid Win.

“Please,” I said.

He didn’t move, looking across the street at the others.

Then, as if the courtesy of the please had given him the ability, he spoke. His voice was quiet enough that I was probably the only one who could hear.

“I live for this,” he said. “It’s what I do.”

It was an admission of weakness, not a boast.

“I know,” I answered him. “But it’s not worth it. Even here, that coffin up there that Mannequin made… if it’s hiding Jack, keeping people from sensing him until the end of this lunatic game he set up, then he could say something. Do something, and you could become everything you’re trying to stop.”

No. I’d said something that was off the mark. I saw Eidolon hesitate, as if he was considering going ahead anyways.

“And you’re all so safe?” Eidolon asked me. “You’re not such a danger, with the right trigger event, the right saying? You couldn’t murder a town full of innocents as readily as you murdered Alexandria?”

“The difference between you and me,” I said, “Is if I go off the rails, if I somehow become an agent of the apocalypse, I can be stopped. I can be killed.”

He stared at me, the shadows of his eyes only barely visible behind the blue-green expanse of the concave mask he wore. The shadow cast by his hood didn’t help.

“There’s a quarantine, Eidolon. Everything we’re bringing to the table here, everyone who’s on the front lines, they’ve talked about this, they’ve agreed. We’re all willing to die if it comes down to it, for the sake of maintaining that quarantine, keeping the end of the world from coming to pass.”

He looked past me at the Undersiders and Brockton Bay Wards.

“I’m willing to die if I have to,” he said, in his eerie chorus of a voice. “I’ve proven that enough times… but it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“There’s no guarantee we could stop you before it was too late.”

“I see.”

He cast a glance over our assembled ranks, then took off.

I waited long moments before turning my attention to the crowd at the far end of the room. They were already moving, running like they could make their way downstairs and escape out the front doors.

I drew my knife, stepping into their path.

“Weaver?”

My bugs flowed past them. I could see, hear, smell, taste.

The swarm went on the attack. People in the crowd screamed and ran.

Of the three I’d targeted in their midst, I saw one open his mouth wide. Four small trilobite parasites crawled out, dropping to the ground.

His nostril bulged, and one crawled from his nasal cavity. One crawled from each of his ears.

His pants bulged, a great deal in the back, then a little in front. They fell out of the bottom of his pant legs.

The others were producing some now too.

Crucible caught the first in his forcefield. He paused a second, then turned it on full burn. The forcefield dissipated, and man, parasites and a circular section of floor were scorched black.

The other two were still fighting off the bugs when Crucible burned them as well.

Silence reigned. The crowd, I think, was a little too horrified to cheer for us.

“First kill?” Imp asked, quiet.

“Yeah”

“How the fuck did you get to be a hero with a power like that?”

“Kept it a secret from you guys, kept it a secret from the public. You can do a lot with a solid forcefield bubble.”

Grue and Clockblocker joined me as we approached the coffin.

It opened easily, and we stepped back, as Crucible surrounded it in a bubble.

Jack?

He lay inside, opened his eyes, and frowned.

“This didn’t go according to plan,” he said.

I could see the forcefield start to change hues, ready to bake before Jack could say anything devastating.

He stepped forward, staggered a little, then poked at the forcefield bubble with his knife.

“Shall we put an end to all of this? You got me. Victory is yours. Murder me, and they all go off leash.”

“It’s not Jack,” I repeated myself. “It’s Nyx’s power.”

Jack’s expression became a frown. Then he dissipated.

It was only a teenager, trapped inside. He was in the middle of asking a question. “-you let me out?”

“Holy fuck. I almost burned him,” Crucible said.

The boy pounded one hand on the forcefield. “Please!”

“I’ll let him out,” Crucible said.

I hesitated, holding up a hand.

No. Not enough grounding to say for sure. I let my hand drop.

“Weaver?”

I was about to give the go-ahead, but Tattletale’s voice came over the comm. “That’s Nyx you’re looking at. Her range is too short, she’d have to be in the building, and she’s too distinctive looking to pass in a crowd.”

The ‘boy’ faded away. An illusion in an illusion. It was only a woman with pale red skin, overlarge black eyes and vents along her hairline, the back of her neck and down the backs of her arms. A fog seeped out from the holes. A small Cauldron emblem was tattooed on her face like a beauty mark.

“No way I can convince you to let me go?”

“You could,” I said.

“Hey,” Grue said. “She’s too dangerous.”

“For good enough information? I’m willing to risk it.”

“I agree,” Clockblocker said.

“Good information?”

“Tell us where Jack is,” I told her.

She smiled. “And I get to go free?”

“My word as a hero,” Clockblocker answered her.

“He’s on his way to visit Nilbog.”

“It’s true,” Tattletale said.

“Now let me go,” Nyx said. She rolled her shoulders, “Take me into custody, if you have to. All I want is to live.”

“No,” Grue said. “We can’t let her go.”

“No,” Clockblocker agreed. “Crucible?”

Nyx snarled, and the fog blasted out of the vents along her body, forming into a shape.

She didn’t get any further before the orb flared. Her scream was high, loud, and exceedingly brief.

If I’d had any doubt it was Alexandria, it was banished when she followed up the attack. Behemoth started to rise to his feet, and Alexandria struck. It wasn’t a punch with a great deal of wind-up, and she only crossed fifty or sixty feet before driving it home, but the impact was undeniable.

Behemoth absorbed the blow, and redirected it into the ground. He didn’t move, as though the blow had never struck home, but the ground around him shattered like the surface of a mirror. Fragments of rock and clouds of dust flew up around him, and a three-story building on its last legs tumbled over. The damage to the ground made him sink a fraction.

I could see the change in the Endbringer’s demeanor. Before, he’d been wading forward, as if Legend, Eidolon and the metal suits were little more than a strong headwind. He was moving with purpose now, with an opponent that was veering in and out of easy reach, one he could hit, without Legend’s speed or Eidolon’s personal shield.

She had told me that they knew how to fight each other, and I could see that at play, here. Part of the change in Behemoth’s approach might have been that interaction at play.

It was a fight involving four individuals who couldn’t hope to do substantial damage to their opponents. The dragon suits and other capes were a peripheral thing. Alexandria circled, just beyond the perimeter of Behemoth’s kill range, her teammates and their supporting cast bombarding him in the meantime. They destroying the ground beneath his feet, trying to get him when his focus was elsewhere and his ability to redirect the energies of a given attack was reduced.

He couldn’t keep her in mind at all times. She waited until he focused on a different combatant, heaving out lightning or creating flame to attack the ones in the air, and then she struck. Nine times, he simply deflected the strike into the ground, as a rumble and a series of spiderwebbing cracks in the streets, or into the air as a shockwave. Again and again, he came within a heartbeat of getting his hands on her in retaliation, not even flinching as she struck him, reacting with an unnatural quickness as he reached out, to try to pin her using his claws, to strike her into the ground or to time the collapses of buildings to briefly bury her, so he could close the distance.

The times her strikes did get past his defenses, her tiny form in the distance with the black cape trailing behind her lunging into his kill range to deliver a blow or a series of blows, Behemoth stumbled, caught briefly at the mercy of physics.

In a fashion, she was doing the same thing the lightning rod had been, buying all of the rest of us a small reprieve. There was no guarantee, and there wouldn’t be any until he was driven off or we moved a hundred miles away, but she was making the rest of this just a little easier, reducing the destruction just a fraction unless he specifically took the time to work around her.

Was she being more cautious than she needed to be? I saw her pass up on a handful of opportunities I might have taken in her shoes, when his back was turned, his attention sufficiently occupied. Was she aware of something I wasn’t? Was she a convincing fake? Or was she just a little more afraid, after what my bugs had done to her?

However effective the distractions, he was still Behemoth, still implacable, a living tank that could roll over any obstacle and virtually any individual, unleashing an endless barrage of artillery at range. He reached the lightning rod and shoved it to the ground.

I was reminded of my teammates, descended to the ground, where they were still getting sorted. The chains that led from the dogs to the harness had tangled.

“Don’t be too hard on them,” Tecton said. “Some people use humor to deal with bad situations.”

“It’s true,” Regent said, affecting a knowing tone.

“No,” Grue responded. “They’re just idiots. You two keep your mouths shut. The adults are talking.”

Imp raised her middle fingers at him.

He turned to me, “It’s Alexandria? You’re sure?”

“Can you ever be sure of anything? Clones, alternate realities, healing abilities… there’s any number of possibilities.”

In the distance, a glowing orange sphere flew into the sky. It reached a peak, then descended, crashing into the distant skyline.

I reoriented myself and flew up to the edge of the roof to peek at the battle. Behemoth had melted down part of the metal arm and fashioned the melted metal into a superheated lump. A second lump, cooler and not yet fabricated into an aerodynamic shape, was sitting beside him. Alexandria tried to strike it away, but he caught it with one claw. He superheated it, shielding it from Legend and Eidolon’s fire with his body, then heaved it into the air. The projectile flared intensely as it left his kill range, following nearly the same path as before.

Lasers from capes in the distance sliced the second sphere into shreds before it could strike its intended target.

Grue tugged the chain. He looked at Rachel, who only nodded.

And we were moving again.

I returned to my recon position, scouting to ensure the way was clear, keeping an eye on the fight and ensuring that there weren’t any attacks coming our way.

Behemoth was glowing, his gray skin tending more towards white, a stark contrast to his obsidian horns and claws. The heroes were backing off a measure, and Behemoth was taking advantage of the situation to stampede forward, tearing past buildings and barricades.

“Grue!” I shouted. The noise in the distance was getting worse. If Behemoth was continuing the path I’d seen him traveling, he was wading through a series of buildings. Grue didn’t hear me. I raised my voice, waited until the noise died down, “Radiation! Use darkness!”

He did, and we were cloaked in it. I continued navigating, using my bugs this time. Only a small handful ventured forward at a time, checking for fires. I was flying blind, scouting without the ability to see.

It delayed me when a fire did present itself, and I was delayed even further when I faced the issue of trying to communicate it to the team.

“Fire!” I shouted. I knew he could hear me through the darkness, but he couldn’t hear me over the sounds of toppled buildings. I was no doubt drowned out by the sound of the sled scraping against the road, the crashes in the background and the rushing of the wind.

I changed direction, aiming for the sleds, and flew forward. A little off target. Didn’t want to knock someone off the sled. I made a slight adjustment with the antigrav, and landed on the front edge of the sled, between Grue and Rachel. Grue very nearly let go in his surprise, and I caught the back of his neck to keep him from falling off the sled.

He left the darkness to either side of us intact and created a corridor.

“Fire!” I said, the instant I was able. “Just over that hill! Go left!”

He cleared more darkness, and we turned sharply enough that the sleds swung out wide. I held on to the lip of the sled, but I let myself slide back, using the antigrav pack to keep myself from falling to the road.

The sudden movement had shifted the occupants. The design of the sled made it difficult for anyone to fall out, but they’d slumped against one side, and one man was hanging halfway out. With only one usable arm, he wasn’t able to maintain a grip.

The sled went over a series of bumps, and I reached him just in time to give him the support he needed, one hand and both feet on the lip of the sled, the other hand holding him.

Once they were on course, I helped ease him down to a better position.

He said something that I couldn’t understand, his words breathless.

I took off.

A shockwave ripped past us, harsher, briefer and more intense than a strong wind, not quite the organ-pulverizing impact it might be if Behemoth were closer, or if there were less buildings in the way. I ventured up to a rooftop where I might be able to see beyond the darkness.

The shockwave had parted the clouds of smoke, but they began to close together once again. I could make out a form, maybe one of the Indian capes, swiftly growing. Ethereal, translucent, his features vague, the light he emitted only barely cutting through the smoke cover. He slammed hands into Behemoth’s face and chest.

Behemoth parted his hands, then swung them together. I didn’t wait for them to make contact. I ducked behind cover before the shockwave could hit me directly. All around me, the smoke was dashed out of the sky by the impact’s reach. With the front of my body hugging the building, I could feel not only the shockwave, but the vibrations that followed it, as buildings fell and debris settled in new locations.

He delivered shockwave after shockwave, and I was forced to abandon the cover of the building for something a little more distant.

He wasn’t irradiated any more. Or, at least, the glow wasn’t there. He’d been buying himself a reprieve from the assault of the heroes, a chance to cover more ground. Now they had resumed the counter-offensive. The noises of the fight followed me as I got ahead of the Undersiders.

Another obstacle. A crowd, this time.

I landed on the sled once more and ordered a stop. It took a second for the dogs to slow down enough.

Locals stood in our way. Some had guns. They ranged the gamut from people a step above homelessness to businessmen.

“Leader?” one asked, his voice badly accented. He was younger, very working class, which surprised me. I’d anticipated that someone older and more respectable would be taking charge.

“Me,” I said, using a small boost from the flight pack to get ahead of the group.

“Stealing?” he asked me, his voice hard.

“No. Injured.”

He gestured towards the sled, taking a half-step forward. I nodded.

I didn’t like wasting time, but I was hoping he’d give the a-okay and the group would get out of our way. I watched as he studied the people lying in the sled.

I could sense a group approaching from Behemoth’s general direction. Two women in evening gowns, a girl in a frock, another girl in costume.

No time to dwell on decisions. I asked the man, “You sure?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Cuff, Annex, kill the chains. Leave sleds behind. Wards, stay with me. Grue, I’ll direct you guys to the Ambassadors. Take the dogs. Leave us some darkness for cover so we’re safe from any more radiation.”

It took only a few seconds to get organized. By the time the Undersiders had departed, we had a team of people pulling the sleds.

“Message from Defiant. Stay out of her way until we know more. Behemoth’s approaching the first perimeter. I will keep you posted.”

“Tell him thank you.”

“It’s a good thing,” Grace said. “Maybe not in the long run, but for now-”

“For now it’s an unknown factor,” I said. “And there’s one really big known factor that’s tearing through this city, and we should be devoting all our attention to it. To Behemoth”

“We can focus on both,” Tecton said.

“That’s how you get blindsided,” I told him. I hauled on the chain, and the sled moved. Cuff seemed to be doing the lion’s share of the work, standing between the sleds and ushering them forward. Though it screwed up the direction the sleds were facing, making them veer left or right, it gave us enough momentum that we only needed to work on keeping it going.

We reached a squat building with signs featuring unintelligible writing and cars. Some hurried forward and opened a garage door, and we kept the sleds on course to lead them inside.

Their ‘hiding place’ was an underground corridor, leading beneath and between two hoists for the cars. Annex had to reshape the sled to fit, and we found ourselves on a general downward incline. People shifted position to the sides of the sled to keep it from getting away from us and running over the people in front.

I saw the man who’d done the talking glance down at the wounded. His eyes caught the light in a way that reminded me of a dog, or a cat.

Capes. At least some of these guys are capes, I thought. The ‘cold’ capes, the underworld’s locals.

It was an ominous realization, as we descended, to know that we were outnumbered by parahumans I knew nothing about, with unknown motives.

The armband’s crackling was getting steadily worse. “Message from Grue. Rendezvous is fine. On way to your location.”

“Message received,” I replied.

“Message from Grue…”

The voice devolved into crackling.

Too much ambient electromagnetic radiation, and the amount of ground that was between us and Grue probably didn’t help.

It was hard to gauge how deep we were getting. We reached a point where a fissure made moving the sleds more difficult, but Annex, Tecton and Golem shored it up in moments.

We descended deep enough that I wasn’t able to access the surface with my bugs, then deeper still.

The more isolated we were, the more ominous the uncostumed capes around us seemed to become. My bugs followed us down the corridor, just far enough back that the ‘cold’ parahumans couldn’t see them, close enough to help.

My nudge became a shove as I moved his arm enough to get his attention. He looked at me, and I shook my head. Tecton didn’t finish the sentence.

“Oh so pretty,” Wanton offered.

“Don’t you start,” Tecton said. “The Undersiders are bad enough.”

I could see the Wards change in demeanor as we descended well beneath the city. Tecton’s head was turning now, scanning the people around us. Wanton hunched over, as if the surroundings were weighing on him, a pressure from above. Cuff had her arms folded, hugging her body, a defensive wall, however meager, against an attacker from above, and both Annex and Grace had gravitated closer to other team members, as if unconsciously adopting a loose formation.

Golem, odd as it was, seemed to fall more in line with Tecton and I, watching the surroundings, eyeing the strangers who accompanied us. It wasn’t that he wasn’t afraid; everything else about him suggested he was. It was more that he was wary in a natural, practiced way.

How had he picked that up? He was supposed to be a rookie.

I held my tongue and used my bugs to scan the surroundings.

The area opened up into an underground living space, crowded with weary and scared people. It was dim, with lights alternating between floor and ceiling positions, tight corridors with what seemed to be tiny apartments carved out of the rock. My prison cell had more space than these quarters. At least there was room to stand straight up in the jail. These rooms were stacked on top of one another, two high.

But it was space nonetheless.

“Is it stable?” I asked Tecton.

“I can’t see enough to tell,” he said. “Maybe? Probably?”

“I don’t know if I can leave people here if it’s a deathtrap,” I said, as I eyed the people emerging from the rooms.

“Pretty risky up there,” Wanton said.

Up there there’s a chance. I was counting hundreds or thousands down here. My bugs could sense corridors, and I was left wondering if this was only one area of many.

Some of the residents stepped forward to help, hands on weapons or simply watching us, undecided on whether we were threats or not.

The leader, who I was mentally labeling ‘Cat’s Eyes’, said something, and they relaxed a fraction. He said something else, and they started helping the wounded. None used or displayed any overt powers.

“Done,” Cat’s Eyes said. “You go. Fight.”

Defiant had said we needed their assistance. “We need your help. You and any of the others with powers.”

He narrowed his eyes. Except that wasn’t the sum total of the change in his expression. His face hardened, drew tighter, high cheekbones somehow more prominent in the dim, lips pressed together. “No.”

“No. We show ourselves, and all ends badly. We fight subtle war. Better to lose today and fight subtle war tomorrow.”

Better to let Behemoth win than to show themselves and lose whatever edge they hold against their current enemies?

“You see me, I am done. Finished. You see all of us, they are done. No.”

Maybe India had its own share of capes, on the same scale as the Slaughterhouse Nine. Cleverer capes who worked in the background.

Or maybe they were just deluded, too set in their ways, afraid to fight and searching for excuses.

“Go. Defeat him,” he told me.

Grue was waiting. Or Grue was coming down here, maybe, with Rachel and the others. If they saw him, an intruder without invitation, would they act?

“Okay,” I said. “We need a vehicle if, um…”

I trailed off as I mentally registered what my bugs were sensing.

A rush of cool, air-conditioned air in a space that had no right to have any, off to one side, the appearance of a person where there shouldn’t be any.

“Weaver?”

I’d stopped talking, my attention caught by this visitor. She was close. All of the details matched the person I’d sensed inside the Kulshedra. The clothes, the hair, the dimensions, even the way she moved.

Purposeful, unhurried.

“It’s her. The one who took Pretender.”

Everyone, myself included, tensed as she approached. The foreign capes did it because she was an unknown variable. The Wards and I did it because she was a known threat.

She was older, but not old. Maybe my dad’s age, maybe a little younger. Pretty, in a very natural way. She didn’t wear any obvious makeup, and her black hair was somewhere between wavy and curly, a little longer than shoulder length. Her features French or Italian, if I had to guess. She wore only a simple black suit that had been tailored to fit her body, with a narrow black tie and a white dress shirt. What got me were the eyes. There was no kindness in them.

She spoke, but she spoke in a foreign language, and it wasn’t to me.

Cat’s Eyes hesitated, then gave her a reply.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked the woman.

She glanced at me, and her gaze went right through me, as if I were barely there. She turned her attention back to Cat’s Eyes, said something else.

His eyes widened.

“You work for Cauldron,” I said.

“Maybe we shouldn’t taunt the bogeyman,” Wanton chimed in.

“Bogeyman?” Cuff asked.

“She’s a hitman,” I said. “Takes out anyone asking too many questions about Cauldron. Or she was. Apparently she’s gone after a lot of powerful capes, walked away without a hitch.”

My bugs gathered. I could see the underground capes reacting, preparing for a fight.

“No,” Tecton said, “The truce.”

“I don’t think she gives a damn about the truce,” I answered.

“Until she breaks it, we don’t break it.”

I didn’t take my eyes off her as I murmured, “Fun fact about life or death fights between capes. You start letting your enemies make the first move, your mortality rate triples.”

“I gave the go-ahead for you to be acting leader,” Tecton said. “Cool. Lightning rod was fantastic. But if we start a fight here and shit goes down, my ass is on the line too.”

“You’re vetoing my order?”

“You haven’t given an order yet, and no. You’ve fought her, I haven’t. But I’m advising you here. Back off. She hasn’t done anything aggressive.”

“She will,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. “It’s your call.”

I didn’t give an order. I watched instead.

She was speaking to Cat’s Eyes in a low voice. He was nodding unconsciously as she spoke.

Then she met my eyes.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Go, Weaver. Take your team. We have no business with you anymore.”

“Anymore?”

She only stared at me in response.

Damn, being on the receiving end of that stare was like being opposite Alexandria or Faultline in a bad mood. I was starting to settle on the idea of her being a thinker.

She looked at Cat’s Eye, “It’s time. Tell them not to be afraid, and this will go smoothly. Tell them to pass on the message so everyone hears.”

He nodded, then called something out in another language. Others took up the call.

“Hold on,” I said, raising my voice.

They didn’t listen. Why would they? I barely had any clout. The bugs around me were minor, all things considered.

I brought them closer, so they gathered at my feet. She didn’t even flinch.

One by one, portals appeared, rectangular doorways that were so bright they were painful to look at. The smell of flowers, fresh air and nature flooded into the underground. Every pathway and every available surface soon had one. Nearly a dozen in my field of view alone. My bugs could sense two dozen more in my range.

“No!” I called out, once I realized what was happening. I thought of what the Eidolon clone had said, about them experimenting on people, kidnapping people from alternate worlds. “You can’t trust her!”

But the people here were scared. Once the first few people tentatively made their way through, they ran for safety, running out into the open field, disappearing behind tall wild grass.

Cat’s Eye turned to leave.

I reached for him, to grab his wrist before he could disappear.

The woman in the suit deftly deflected my hand, batting it aside.

“What the hell is Cauldron doing? Do you want to start a war?”

She shook her head. “No war. But we need soldiers.”

That was all the confirmation I needed.

“Wards!” I called out. My bugs and my Wards converged on her.

It mattered surprisingly little. She stepped away from me, which I took as an excuse to close the distance. If she wanted to get away, I’d get closer. I worked to close the distance, using both the flight pack and my own two feet to draw in. She stepped back out of the way, just out of reach of my strikes.

She swept her hands by the sides of her belt, and she was suddenly armed, if I counted a stiletto knife no longer than my finger and a handkerchief as weapons.

In the moment my swarm drew close, she stabbed the knife into a wall-mounted fire extinguisher. The pressurized contents spewed out in a plume, collecting on my bugs and blocking their path. It disabled the largest ones and killed the smallest, eliminating a good ninety percent of the bugs I had in reach in an instant. I was forced to back off, so I didn’t get the spray across my lenses or the fabric at my mouth.

She’d managed to avoid getting dirty, even. I watched her from the other side of the spraying canister. The direction of the plume and the hand with the handkerchief left her virtually untouched as Tecton drew close. She danced back out of reach of his attack as he plowed past the spray. Wanton had transitioned to the form of a localized telekinetic storm, and Annex had slipped into the ground, closing the distance to her.

If she was a thinker, someone relying on craftiness to win a fight, then I’d turn it into the kind of fight she didn’t want to participate in. Tecton had power armor, Grace had super strength and Cuff had her metallokinesis.

I cranked up the flight suit and charged. It was reckless, and it was hopefully the last thing she’d expect. The goal was simple. Close to melee, keep her occupied long enough for someone to trap her. With that done, we’d call each of the people she’d just contacted and bring them back to safety.

Assuming she was someone along the lines of Victor or Über, a combat-oriented thinker, she’d try to do something like a Judo throw, redirecting my forward momentum to toss me to the ground. I countered that particular maneuver by bringing myself to an almost complete stop before she could grab me, slipping to one side as Tecton closed the distance.

He punched, and she stepped back. He extended the piledriver, a second punch without an instant of warning, and she evaded to one side.

A precog?

I wasn’t even finished the thought when she stepped around to Tecton’s side. He tried to body-check her, but she had a hand up to rest on his side, using the contact to brace herself, to push against him and leverage herself away. She crossed one leg over the other to maintain an upright position, then brought herself into arm’s reach of me.

Bugs exploded from the interior of my costume. Spiders, hornets, wasps and beetles. The only parts of her that weren’t covered by the suit were her head and hands. The hands were clasped behind her back before the swarm reached her. A sharp toss of her hair swept them out of her way as she invaded my personal space.

Her hands, protected from my bugs by the simple obstacle of her torso, reached out, avoiding the worst of my swarm. One caught the concealed flap of my mask, where it overlapped the neck of my costume, and pulled it down. The other pressed the tip of the stiletto knife to my jugular.

My team, just a moment behind me and Tecton in their intent to engage her, froze.

Fuck me, I had ten thousand bugs here, easy. How had I not found an opportunity to even bite or sting her?

“Wards, back off,” she said. “Grace, Cuff, I want you out of sight, or Weaver bleeds.”

The two girls looked at me, and I nodded. They backed away and stepped around the corners.

“Send your bugs away,” she ordered me.

I started to open my mouth to protest, but she cut me off. “No tricks. You have two seconds.”

Something about the fact that she was a known killer and her no-nonsense tone suggested she really was going to follow through. I banished the bugs.

Was she distracted? I controlled the insect-like limbs on my flight pack. They were simple, weak, but they were also weapons. The end of the claw stabbed for her face, for the general region of her right eye.

She turned her head, and it grazed harmlessly against her temple. The blade of her knife turned around, and she caught it in the hinge of one mechanical arm.

I pulled away, but the knife being wedged in the gap of the joint gave her a measure of leverage over the mechanical arm. She twisted it as though she were wrenching my arm behind my back. The arm didn’t give any, and I was forced to bend over a fraction.

Golem reached out from one wall, trying to seize her hair or neck, but she used me as a body shield, blocking the reaching hand. Annex struck from below, attempting to ensnare her feet, but she threw me down into the reaching tendrils. In the process, she got ahold of my wrist, twisting it much as she had the mechanical arm.

“Coordinate!” I said, my voice tight. I activated the thrusters on my flight pack in an attempt to tear way, but she wrenched me to one side, tilting my upper body while using one leg to block my lower body from following suit. The end result was that the thruster only pushed me into the wall. I managed to avoid slamming my head against the surface, but I was now pinned against a solid surface. She still had my wrist behind my back.

Dodge this, I thought. I commanded my bugs to attack from every direction.

The Wards were taking my order seriously, attacking simultaneously. Annex was looming, a spectre in the ground, raising up to try to engulf her, Golem was beside a wall, already reaching into it, and Tecton was kneeling, pressing his gauntlets against the ground. Cuff and Grace had heard my order, and were stepping into view, advancing from behind the others.

The woman laid her free hand over the hand she was twisting behind my back. Then she pressed my own fingers down into my palm, hard.

The control mechanism, I thought. Too late. My bug was already moving towards the off switch when the thruster kicked in. She swept my feet out from under me, and the thruster drove me into the ground. The bug touched the off switch, but the impact had locked up the controls.

I hit Annex on my way down, buying the woman time to step back out of his reach. The bug managed to turn off the thruster, but I was already sliding across the floor, right through the lower half of Wanton’s telekinetic storm body and straight into Tecton’s gauntlets.

The piledrivers fired into the ground a fraction of a second after I bumped into the gloves. He’d likely aimed to place an effect directly beneath her, but my collision with the gloves had knocked his aim off by a fraction. It was directed into a wall, creating a crack ten feet high.

The woman pulled her suit jacket off and held it out, sweeping it through the air to catch the thickest collection of my swarm within. She folded it closed, simultaneously breaking into stride, heading right for Wanton. Grace and Cuff were just behind him, with Tecton directly behind them, and Golem and I off to one side. Annex was still pulling his spacial-distortion body together into something more useful.

“Stand down, Wards!” I called out, before Wanton could make contact with her. I was still pulling myself up off the ground.

The woman slowed her pace, coming to a stop. Wanton materialized a few feet in front of her, swiftly backing away. I dismissed the bugs that were closing in to attack.

“This goes any further, she’s going to stop going easy on us and she’ll murder someone, maybe murder all of us,” I said, not taking my eyes off her. “Because it’s the only way she’d be able to stop the bugs from surrounding her, the only way to really stop Wanton once he closes the distance.”

She didn’t speak.

“What the hell are you?” I asked. “What’s your power?”

She gave me a look, up and down, and then settled her eyes on mine. Throughout the entire fight, she’d looked unconcerned. She wasn’t even breathing hard. Except for a fleck of foam from the extinguisher here and there on the bottom of her pants leg and at the very end of her shirtsleeve, she wasn’t even particularly dirty.

She spoke, “I win.”

“I gathered that much,” I said.

“What I mean is that I can see the paths to victory. I can carry them out without fail.”

“She’s lying,” Wanton said. “That’s ridiculous. It’s not even close to fair.”

Powers aren’t necessarily fair, I thought.

“It doesn’t matter,” the woman said. “What matters is that there are other enemies you should be fighting.”

“Enemies, plural?” I asked.

“We’re approaching an endgame. The end of the world, the sundering of the Protectorate. Most of the major players know this, and the truce has effectively dissolved in every respect but the official one. Those in positions of power are making plays. Now. Today.”

“And Alexandria showing up, that’s a part of that?” I asked. “Someone’s ploy?”

“Yes.”

“Cauldron’s or someone else’s?”

“Yes,” she said. A noncommittal answer.

“And you’re telling us this why?” I asked.

“That should be obvious.”

“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t sure it was that obvious. “Just two questions, then. Those people you just took-”

“Are gone,” she said.

Gone. And there wasn’t a thing I could do to change that. I was almost certain I couldn’t beat her, and I couldn’t utilize whatever it was that was managing the portals to get access to them. At most, I could survive long enough to report this to someone who could.

“Gone temporarily or gone permanently?” Tecton asked.

“I don’t expect anyone on this Earth will see them again, barring an exceptional success on our end.”

“You can’t use your power to get those successes automatically, huh?” I asked.

She didn’t venture an answer.

“Right, that wasn’t my second question. What I want to know is why the hell you haven’t used a power like yours to figure out how to beat the Endbringers.”

“My power is a form of precognition,” she said. “Unlike most such powers, other precognitive abilities do not confuse it. That said, there are certain individuals it does not work against, the Endbringers included.”

“Why?” Tecton asked.

“No way to know for sure,” she said, “But we have theories. The first is that they have a built-in immunity, something their origins granted them.”

“And the other theories?” Golem ventured. “What’s the next one?”

The woman didn’t respond.

I suspected I knew what the answer was, but declined to speak of it. It would do more harm than good.

“So you’re blind here, useless,” Grace said, a touch bitter.

The woman shook her head. “No. I can consider a hypothetical scenario, and my power will provide the actions needed to resolve it.”

“And?”

“And we are doing just that,” she said. “Doorway, please.”

She wasn’t speaking to us. Another gate opened behind her, and it wasn’t to that sunny field with the tall grass. There was only a hallway with white walls and white floors, a cool rush of air-conditioned air touching our faces.

“Doing just what, exactly?” Tecton called out after her.

She turned back to us, but she didn’t respond. The portal closed, top to bottom.

“Vehicles,” I said, the instant she was gone. “I can sense some at the end of that path. It’s the fastest way back up that ramp. Go, go!”

■

Things had gotten worse in the thirty minutes we’d been gone. Whole tracts of New Delhi had been leveled, and where the buildings had been tall and mostly intact while we collected the injured and met the ‘cold’ India capes, only half of them stood even a story tall now. The other half? Utterly leveled.

It was a small grace that the fires had burned intensely enough that they’d exhausted the possible fuel, and the smoke was mostly gone, but that wasn’t saying much. I couldn’t take a deep breath without feeling like I needed to cough. Ozone and smoke were thick in the air, and the residual charge in the air was making my hair stand on end.

The Endbringer’s path of destruction had continued more or less in one general direction, but beyond that, the damage was indiscriminate, indeterminate. Behemoth’s location, in contrast, was very clear. A pillar of darkness extended from the ground to the sky. Plumes of smoke and streaks of lightning slipped through the darkness on occasion.

The Chicago Wards rode bikes that were somewhere between a scooter and a motorcycle in design. The vehicles might have been indistinguishable from normal road vehicles, but Tecton had quickly discovered that they had some other features. There were gyros that allowed them to tilt without allowing them to fall, and the engines were electric, with only the option of a generated sound, to appear normal.

Near-silent, the Wards zipped down the streets, zig-zagging past piles of rubble and fissures. I flew above the group.

“Armband,” I said, touching the button. “Status update.”

The ensuing reply was too distorted to make out.

Grue had gone ahead, though he’d no doubt had information on our whereabouts. Bitch’s dogs probably could have sniffed us out. He’d gone ahead. Why?

“Armband,” I said, still holding the button, “Repeat.”

I thought there might have been an improvement, as we got closer, but it was miniscule enough that I might have been imagining it.

I dropped down, settling on the back of Wanton’s bike. The wings were already tucked away, to minimize damage from the electromagnetic radiation, but I didn’t want to push my luck further.

We passed a cluster of dead capes, alongside a series of massive gun turrets that had been mounted on hills and rooftops. The heroes had made a stand here, or it had been one defensive line of many. A number had died.

Had it been foolish to descend to the cold cape’s undercity? Should I have told them to take the wounded beneath, damn the consequences, so we could have helped more?

I hadn’t thought it would take as long as it had, hadn’t anticipated a fight with the woman in the suit.

I hoped I wouldn’t regret this, that the absence hadn’t cost our side something. We weren’t the most powerful capes in the world, but maybe we could have made a small difference here or there.

I’d learned things, but did that count for anything in the now, with tens, hundreds or thousands of individuals dying where they might have lived if we’d stayed? Another lightning rod? Something to slow him down and give them a precious extra second to form a defensive line?

The second defensive line, another collection of the dead. Whatever method they’d tried here, there was no trace left now.

We were getting closer.

The third perimeter. A giant robot, in ruins. As many dead here as there had been at the last two points, all put together.

And just beyond this point, Behemoth, in the flesh. He glowed white, marking the radioactive glow, and Grue’s darkness wreathed him, containing it. The ground beneath Behemoth was tinted gold, vaguely reflective, and geometric shapes were floating in the air, exploding violently when he came in contact with them.

With all of the obstacles he’d faced to this point, he looked less hurt than his younger brother had for his one-on-one fight with Armsmaster. He didn’t limp, or slouch, his limbs were intact, his capabilities undiminished. The tears and rents in his flesh and the gaping wounds here and there didn’t seem to have slowed him down in the slightest.

And with that, he managed to fight his way forward, out of Grue’s darkness, striking out with bolts of lightning. Forcefields went up to protect the defensive line, but only half of them withstood the intensity of the strikes.

“Armband,” I said, and there was a note of horrified awe to my voice, “Status update.”

The A.I.’s voice crackled, but Grue’s darkness might have been suppressing the electrical charge, because it was intelligible. “Chevalier is out of action, Rime is present commanding cape for field duty. Legend is out of commission. Capes are to assist defensive lines and fall back when call is given. Earliest possible Scion intervention is twenty-two point eight minutes from the present time, estimated Scion intervention is sixty-five minutes from present time, plus or minus eighteen minutes.“

I clenched my jaw. I’d committed to doing something, but I had no idea what that could be.

I felt a sick feeling in my gut.

“Armband, status of Tattletale?”

“Out of commission.“

By all rights, I should have reacted, cried out, declared something. I only felt numb. This was falling apart too quickly.

“Status of the other Undersiders?”

“Two injured. Parian and Grue.”

Which would be why Grue wasn’t replenishing his darkness. I closed my eyes for a second, trying to find my center, feeling so numb I wasn’t sure it was possible.

Citrine’s effect seemed to be maximizing the effects of Alexandria’s attacks, because Behemoth wasn’t able to channel them into the ground.

He swung his head in my general direction, and I could see the steel of Flechette’s arrows in the ball of his eye, clustered. Holes marked the point where the bolts had simply penetrated.

Other capes had managed varying degrees of damage. The Yàngbǎn had formed a defensive squadron, using lasers to cut deep into Behemoth’s wounds, and other capes clustered close to them, adding to the focused assault.

And yet he advanced. Inevitable.

A blast of flame caught the defending capes off guard. Their forcefields and walls of stone blocked the flame from reaching the capes, but did nothing to stop it from spreading as it set fire to nearby buildings, grass and the stumps of trees that had been freshly cut, if the sawdust was any indication.

As if alive, the fires reached forward, extended to nearby flammable surfaces, and cut off a formation. They started to clear the way for retreat, and Behemoth punished them with a series of lightning strikes.

Golem was already acting, bringing stone hands up to block Behemoth’s legs, two hands at a time. Tecton moved forward, striking the earth with his piledrivers. Fissures raced across the road, breaks to keep any impacts from reaching too far.

“Antlion pit!” I shouted.

“Right!” Tecton reported.

And my team was engaging, finding the roles they needed to play. Grace, Cuff and I couldn’t do much, but there were more wounded needing help getting out of the area. Annex began reshaping the ground and walls to provide better cover. Wanton cleared away debris from footpaths.

This particular front hinged on one cape, a foreign cape who was creating the exploding, airborne polygons. I could see, now, how each explosion was serving to slow time in the area around the blast. Had he actually been the inspiration for that particular bomb Bakuda had made?

Eidolon had added his own abilities to the fray. He had adopted something similar to Alexandria’s powerset, fighting in melee, ducking in only long enough to deliver a blow, then backing away before Behemoth’s kill aura could roast him from the inside. Eidolon was using another power as well, one I’d seen him deploy against Echidna. A slowing bubble.

Cumulative effects. Cumulative slowing. Each explosion added to the effect, and Eidolon’s slowing bubble was a general factor to help them along. What did it really do if you tried to walk forward, and the upper half of your leg moved faster in time than the bottom half? How much strain did that create? Was there a point where the leg would simply sever?

If there was, Behemoth hadn’t quite reached that point. Either way, it seemed to be a factor in how slow Behemoth was moving. He was getting bogged down. Bogged down further as one foot dipped into Tecton’s antlion pit.

Until the Endbringer struck out, targeting one group of capes with a series of lightning strikes so intense that I was momentarily left breathless.

And the explosive polygons disappeared.

He lurched forward, and even a direct hit from Alexandria wasn’t quite enough to stop him. The shockwave dissipated into the air, rather than the ground, and flying capes throughout the skies were driven back.

The Endbringer broke into a run, insofar as he could run, and nobody was quite in position to bar his way. He ignored capes and struck out across the area behind them, hitting a building with two massive guns on it, a clearing, a rooftop with what looked like a tesla coil. Fire, lightning, and concussive waves tore through the defensive measures before they could be called into effect.

We don’t have the organization. Our command structure is down. Tattletale is gone, either dead or too hurt to fight.

He struck one area with lightning, and explosives detonated. A massive forcefield went up a moment after they triggered, and the explosion was contained within, a cumulative effect that soared skyward.

For a solid twenty, thirty seconds, the sky was on fire, and the Endbringer tore through our defenses, making his way to a building with capes clustered on the roofs. They weren’t, at a glance, our offensive capes. They were our thinkers, our tinkers, the ones our front line was supposed to be covering.

The woman in the suit had declined to share the other reason her power wouldn’t let her simply solve the Endbringer crisis.

The answer I’d declined to share with the other Wards was a simple one. She had the ability to see the road to victory. Maybe, when it came to the Endbringers, there was nothing for her to see.

Dragon’s craft closed the distance to the rooftop’s edge, using precise adjustments to almost freeze in mid-air as it hovered. It was gentle and graceful in comparison to Defiant’s squat, durable tank. I wondered how intentional that was. Just looking at it, I had little doubt that it was even longer range than any of the other models I’d crossed paths with. I was put in mind of a sniper rifle, long, narrow, sleek and focused in its almost singular design. The stability it had fit with the idea. A stark contrast to Defiant’s craft, which seemed more like the type to be in the thick of a fight, fighting alongside him and complementing his fighting style.

Not that the aesthetics of Dragon’s work was really a priority right this moment.

“A mistake,” I said.

“We know how she operates,” Defiant said. “Dragon, Miss Militia and I have each worked directly under Alexandria at some point. It’s something of an unofficial policy to have anyone that’s being considered for a leadership position working under each member of the triumvirate for a time.”

“Must have been real fun for you guys when you found out what they’re really like, last month.”

“Not fun at all,” Miss Militia said. She had to stoop to exit the ship and step onto the roof’s edge.

“We’ve seen how Alexandria handles interrogations,” Defiant said. “She reads microexpressions. Shapes every statement and action to get the responses she wants.”

“And she wanted this?” I asked.

Defiant shook his head. “Knowing her, this was a gambit. It wouldn’t do to have one workable outcome. She pushes you, and if you attack, she has cause to finish you off or send you straight to the birdcage without a trial. If you don’t attack, she knows she has leverage against you and the Undersiders. She’d see which way you were leaning, then refine her approach further.”

“And here I was,” Miss Militia mused, “Thinking you didn’t have a head for this sort of thing, Defiant.”

“I’ve had help,” he said, glancing at Dragon.

“But she didn’t get either of those results,” I said. “At least, not like she wanted. For all her brains, for all this apparent ability to read me, she… didn’t understand what my friends mean to me.”

“I think she understood well enough,” Defiant said. “But the mistake, the tragedy in all of this, was that she didn’t get an accurate read on you. Much, I expect, for the same reason my lie detector could never seem to. She was working with bad information, and she pushed you too far, too fast.”

An eerie parallel to mistakes Tattletale had made in the past. And I killed Alexandria and Tagg because of it.

“And… my friends? Just to make sure. They’re okay?”

“Alexandria didn’t touch them. The ones she brought into the building were body doubles, and the real Undersiders are poised to attack in-” Miss Militia reached for her phone.

“Fifteen minutes,” Defiant said.

“Fifteen minutes,” Miss Militia said. “In the meantime, we’re trying to deal with your lawyer, who got his hands on the footage of the interrogation and is threatening to bring hell down on our heads-”

Earning his pay, I thought.

She continued without pause. “-And we still have to find a way to handle this without a complete PR catastrophe. Once the media gets hold of this, we lose the ability to control the situation.”

“Dragon is managing the details as we speak,” Defiant said. “She can isolate and track digital communication, but she can’t stop the spread of word of mouth. Chevalier’s doing what he can on his end, but the PRT agents that confirmed Alexandria’s death won’t be able to keep their mouths shut forever, not with something as grave as this.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Miss Militia said.

“Fourteen,” Defiant cut in, correcting her.

“Fourteen minutes,” she said, “That’s our working timeline. Even if Skitter were to call off the Undersiders, we have information leaks.”

“Then what if we let it leak?” I asked. “We say ‘fuck it, the PRT is fucked, Alexandria is a monster, let people figure it out for themselves.'”

“You don’t really want that,” Miss Militia said.

“The system is fucked,” I said. “Everything that’s happened, it’s taught me a few things. People are fucked up, for one thing. And any organization that has people in control is going to be fucked on an exponential level. But for all that, people are a hell of a lot tougher than we give them credit for. We survive. We innovate. So yeah, I’m seriously thinking along those lines. I wouldn’t mind seeing the PRT burn, damn it, because I think we’ll make it regardless.”

“You can’t blame me for standing out of the way. You had a plan, Alexandria told me she had a plan, and nobody shared anything substantial with me. I couldn’t take a step without risking that I’d get in someone’s way.”

I frowned.

“You’re hurt, you’re angry, you’re still reeling from what you thought happened,” Miss Militia said. “Fine. That’s fair. But we don’t have time to work through that. You said you wanted to work together, to compromise.Do you stand by that? Are you willing to at least try a workable solution? Or are you going to keep fighting us?”

I glanced at Defiant. “I’ll hear you out.”

“We need you to call your team and get them to stand down. We can’t have bloodshed, and we can’t have Tattletale divulging critical information.”

I folded my arms. “Meet me halfway.”

“Twelve minutes,” Defiant said. “This isn’t the time to be hard-nosed. You don’t want this fight any more than we do. If this happens, your team will be at a very real risk of death or arrest. Three of the A.I. models, Dragon’s, mine, the Brockton Bay heroes and no less than ten visiting heroes.”

“This is exactly the time to be hard-nosed. The Undersiders get left alone. Those are my terms. Figure it the fuck out.”

There was a pause, an exchange of looks between Defiant and Dragon.

“We’re talking to Chevalier and the Chief Director,” Defiant said.

“Good,” I answered him.

A few seconds passed. I glanced at the sun, dipping beneath the mountains to the west.

“Miss Militia will fill in as an interim PRT director,” a male voice sounded from the speaker at Dragon’s shoulder. Chevalier. “I’ll arrange it. We have leverage, with the current state of emergency and the issues that are liable to come up with the announcement that we can make use of the portal.“

“We’ll keep you in position for as long as we can, postpone any changes or replacements until people get more comfortable with the idea. With luck, we can segue into keeping you in position on a permanent basis. Failing that, we tap someone sympathetic to our aims.”

“Any longer and more mercenaries start walking away, deciding to take the half we paid up front.”

“That’ll do, then, I guess.” I said, giving the heroes a thumbs up.

“You saidthey’re weaker, huh? So it’s true. I didn’t want to use my power to verify… but the rumor mill is right? Alexandria bit it?“

“Yes. I-” I stopped.

“You? You did it?” Tattletale asked. “Guys-”

Her voice faded as she turned away from the phone.

“Don’t tell them,” I said, once I realized what she was saying.

It was too late. I could hear jeers and whooping from Regent and Imp in the background. I couldn’t make out everything Grue was saying, but I caught something along the lines of ‘Jesus H. Fucking Christ.‘

“It’s too late to matter, honey bear,” Tattletale said. “I don’t have much juice powerwise, but I don’t need any to know this much. Word’s already out about Alexandria.”

“Word’s out about Alexandria,” I said, for the benefit of the heroes.

Defiant folded his arms.

“Anything else I can do?” she asked.

“Stay near a phone. Thank you,” I said. And keep the jailbreak specialists on hand, I thought. Not that I could say that with the Protectorate members around me.

“And that will make a lot of people lose hope,” Miss Militia said. “We have other ideas, but we need something bigger, more concrete.”

“But she’s dead,” I said. “The only way to change the reaction is to convince everyone we have a winning game plan anyways. That the PRT isn’t fucked, which it is.”

“The A.I. craft,” Defiant said, turning to look at the Pendragon. “Expendable, versatile, devastating in their own right, and there’s image attached to them. They’ll get the public’s imagination fired up.”

Miss Militia shook her head. “There’ll be doubts, it’s not enough. Behemoth can generate electromagnetic waves that wipe out electronics. Even many reinforced electronics, if he’s close enough. The Simurgh can scramble coding. We don’t just have to convince the public. We need to convince the heroes, and they know these things.”

“And they know what the difference is going to be, without Alexandria on the front lines,” Defiant said. He sighed audibly. “Four times now, she’s been the deciding factor in beating the Simurgh back early. Once with Leviathan, when I was new to the Protectorate.”

“We can reduce the impact of the loss with careful word choice and a good speech,” Miss Militia said. “If Skitter is willing to call off her other dogs.”

I glanced at the phone in my hand. “Okay.”

“No demands this time?”

“Believe it or not, I want to fix things,” I said, as I dialed Mr. Calle’s number. “We’re on the same side here. The difference is I consider my friends to be a part of a workable scenario. I have my issues with you guys, but I’m extending the benefit of a doubt again, and I’m hoping it doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass. Again.”

The phone rang. Mr. Calle answered. “Quinn Calle speaking.”

“It’s Taylor Hebert.”

“Ah, excellent. I’d feared they’d executed you or sent you to be incarcerated.”

“I’m sorry for, um, that,” I said.

“They had one of your good friends in a body bag, or they led you to believe they did. You reacted as many would, with anger and pain. You were simply, how to put it… better equipped than the rest of us mere mortals to express that anger and pain.”

“I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d left.”

“Rest assured, Ms. Hebert, I’ve dealt with worse.”

“Okay,” I said. “I need you to back off on whatever threats you’re directing at the PRT.”

“No can do, I’m afraid.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because, right at this moment, you’re in the custody of the heroes. They’ve given you a phone, no doubt, and they’ve caught you at an emotionally vulnerable moment. For your benefit, I can’t assume you’re of sound mind or that you aren’t being coerced.”

“How do we change your mind?”

“I wouldn’t mind an invitation to the discussion.”

“We’re sending a vehicle your way,” I said. “Where are you?”

“The lovely little shop with the donuts I visited this morning.”

“Okay,” I said, putting my hand over the mouthpiece, “He says-”

I stopped. The armored suit Miss Militia had left was already moving, heading directly for my territory. She’d been listening in.

“Yes,” Defiant said. “She is. Chevalier is on the way as well, and we’ve contacted the media.”

Miss Militia nodded. “The two major crises are being held at bay, thanks to Skitter’s cooperation. We can’t keep the word from spreading through other channels, so let’s cover every base we can. We only get one shot at this.”

“Key points being Skitter’s role in this, and addressing how we deal with Alexandria’s demise,” Defiant said.

“My role?” I asked. “I thought you wanted me to call off the attack?”

“No,” Miss Militia said. “There’s more.”

I narrowed my eyes, very conscious of the fact that there were three rather powerful capes and one mechanized suit in my immediate vicinity. “What more?”

She glanced at Defiant, then back to me. “We’d like you to be there for the conference with the media. Dragon’s going over footage, and so long as your lawyer doesn’t release the unedited content, we can hide the worst of the details from the media. Shape the narrative.”

“You’re lying,” I said.

“We’re revising the truth,” she said. She paused. “Yes. We’re lying.”

“And you want me to participate in that?”

“Yes. Your presence will lend a degree of legitimacy to what we’re saying. We’re on opposite sides, in the public eye, making it all the more meaningful if we agree on what happened.”

“Are you fighting to keep the PRT going, or are you working to rebuild it?” I asked.

“Rebuild it,” she said. No hesitation.

“And you’re doing it by starting with a lie. Just like they did.”

“Yes,” she said. Again, there was no hesitation. “There’s no pretty, perfect answers, and concessions have to be made. Questions and issues on a greater scale mean more repercussions for failure, and they call for bigger concessions if we want to ensure success.”

“And this is a big event, a lot of power,” I said. “Big concessions?”

“Yes,” she said. She looked ten times as tired as she said it.

I folded my arms. I couldn’t disagree. I didn’t like it. But I’d been a leader. I’d made shady calls. I’d hurt people. Had lied, cheated, stolen, killed.

The sun was gone, hidden by the mountains, and the clouds were changing from purple to black. How long until the new deadline? Twenty minutes?

I could see Defiant, saw him conversing with Dragon and Miss Militia.

I saw how he folded his arms, still holding his spear, so it rested against his shoulder. How he planted his feet further apart. A warrior’s stance.

It inspired a memory, of my first night out in costume. The bad guy lying defeated on the street below, the city quiet around us, the dark sky overhead, with only meager light illuminating us. Framing the situation, talking about options and priorities.

Not so different from the scene here. The villain wasn’t here. Alexandria had fallen a distance away. But the city was quiet, the area still blockaded, the sky was dark, and the topic of discussion…

I thought of something, one moment in that night’s discussion when I’d thought that maybe Armsmaster could live up to the reputation, that he could really truly be someone who I could look up to.

“Hey,” I said.

Heads turned my way.

“As far as Alexandria goes, what if we turn it around?”

“Turn it around?”

“Way back, when I first started out in costume, I had a talk with Armsmaster. He told me that I should be happy I was mistaken for a villain, because it meant I didn’t have to fight the Undersiders. This was before I joined them. It reminded me of how I’d been trying to deal with the shit I was going through back then, turning negatives into positives. I think we can do that here.”

“How?” Miss Militia asked. She glanced at Dragon’s craft, just now arriving to bring my lawyer to us.

“So long as we’re lying,” I said, “Let’s go wholesale. We present Alexandria as the villain she was.”

“That’ll make the situation worse,” Miss Militia said.

“It depends on how we present the idea,” I said.

Dragon’s suit once again came to a stop at the edge of the roof, as it had when it had delivered Miss Militia. It turned sideways, and the body opened, revealing my lawyer, looking more stressed than I’d seen him, in the midst of a rather compact cockpit.

Mr. Calle accepted Miss Militia’s offered hand in stepping down to the rooftop, and seemed to relax the instant his feet touched solid ground.

“Whoo,” he said. “Never let it be said that my job isn’t an adventure. You’re well, Ms. Hebert?”

“I am.”

“You haven’t made any deals?”

“Nothing permanent.”

“Good.”

Dragon touched my shoulder. When I turned her way, she set her fingers in my hand, pulling me after her with the light contact of two of her fingertips. Gentle, easy to avoid, but clear enough.

I followed as she led me to her hovering Dragon-craft, Mr. Calle a step behind me. Mr. Calle had longer legs than I did, but he was the one who hesitated at the gap before stepping into the open cockpit.

Once I was on board, Dragon reached over to the wall and opened a shallow drawer, no more than three inches deep. The drawer opened with a noise like something from a science fiction movie.

I stared at the contents.

“How?” I asked, and all of the confidence was gone from my voice. “Wait, nevermind. You’re fu- you’re tinkers, damn it.”

Mr. Calle stepped up beside me, placing one hand on my shoulder in an uncharacteristic need for some support. He looked down. “I take it we’ve reached something of a consensus here?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“Yes,” Defiant said, from the rooftop.

“Then it seems I need to draw up some paperwork,” Mr. Calle said. “For formality’s sake, if nothing else.”

“Do it in five minutes,” Miss Militia said, from Defiant’s side. “We’re out of time. The media’s here.”

“Five?” Mr. Calle seemed momentarily pained. “Paper, fast.”

Dragon handed him a sleek keyboard, pointing to a screen. He started typing.

“I’ll credit you this, Ms. Hebert,” my lawyer said, as he typed away, tabbing to different windows to draw up pages he could copy-paste from. “You manage a great deal of grief and chaos in very short spans of time.”

■

Chevalier had arrived, and stepped into the cockpit. Gold and silver armor, his cannonblade resting against one shoulder. He briefly clasped hands with Defiant.

I stopped tidying my hair long enough to take the stylus from Dragon, scribbling my signature on the offered pad. Others were already present – Miss Militia’s and Defiant’s. The Chief Director’s signature appeared as the document was signed from a remote location.

“You’re ready?” Chevalier asked me.

I shook my head. “No.”

“But you’re willing?”

“Yeah,” I said. I rubbed my arms, then zipped up my prison-issue sweatshirt. “Has to be done, doesn’t it?”

“It’s not pretty,” he said. “There’s a lot of ugliness in this. But yes. This gives us the best chance.”

I nodded. I still had Miss Militia’s phone. I dialed Tattletale.

“Yo?“

“Turn on the TV,” I said. “And call them off. Unless something goes horribly wrong, this is it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah,” I said. No, I thought.

I hung up.

All together, we stepped out of the cockpit and walked around the craft.

The Wards were here. Clockblocker, Vista, Kid Win and Crucible, standing on guard.

Rounding the corner, we approached the open street where the crowd of reporters waited. Television cameras shifted to focus on the reporters announcing our arrival, or to follow us as we walked. Tripod-mounted lights cast shafts of light across the road, all converging on one point, the makeshift stage – the flat ledge of the Dragon-suit’s wing, five feet off the ground. Voices bubbled around us, a million questions, almost a singular noise.

Chevalier stepped forward, and they simultaneously drew quiet. He had a presence, a kind of nobility that garnered respect.

“Today, not two hours ago, Alexandria was killed.”

I could barely see the reporters past the massive lights that were shedding light on the stage, on us. They were solemn, focused on every single word. They didn’t even flinch at the news. They’d already known.

“Alexandria was a veteran among capes. She was one of the first capes, one who was present for almost every major catastrophe in the last twenty years. With every challenge she surmounted, she reaffirmed our belief in her, showed us how strong she was, how impervious and noble she was.”

He lowered his head. I resisted the urge to fidget. This was showing live, to homes across America.

On a rooftop nearby, capes teleported in. Other capes, flying, were touching down on top of a news car. Dovetail, with Sere beside her.

“If that was it, this would be hard enough,” he spoke. “But she was a mythic figure in her own way. She was a living symbol, recognized across the world. She was a leader among us. She was a friend to some of us.”

I sensed rather than saw Eidolon, hovering well above the reach of the lights. Legend was close too, though less intent on hiding.

I steeled myself for what came next, willing myself to stay calm, to not give anything away.

“And she was a traitor.”

That garnered a response from the news reporters. Shouted questions pierced the silence that loomed in the wake of Chevalier’s words.

He continued. “When Alexandria was slain, earlier today, it was done by individuals standing on this stage.”

Every word carefully chosen, so it was technically or at least partially true. Alexandria was a traitor, with her involvement with Cauldron, she had been slain at the hands of someone on the stage.

“There are individuals out there right now, who have kept quiet about recent events. Only last month, there was an event in this city, a threat that was theorized to be a nascent Endbringer. In the wake of that event, Alexandria was revealed to be partially responsible.”

The reporters, I noted, were deathly still. Deer in the headlights.

“Good capes,” Chevalier said, “Burdened by conscience, walked away from the PRT. Without them to serve as our backbone, we were left gutted. There has been rampant speculation on what has been going on within the PRT, on what might have caused so many capes to abandon it. We –they– couldn’t speak because Alexandria held a position of power, because she was purportedly invincible, unassailable. Because of the threat she posed, and the resources she had at her disposal.”

Others were joining the crowd of reporters. Civilians, returning now that the blockades had been taken down, maybe going home, only to see the scene, the heroes in the spotlight. They clustered, or parked at the periphery of the crowd, getting out of their cars.

How many millions were tuning in right this moment?

“Some of us left, because their consciences couldn’t bear serving a corrupt power. Others, many of us on the stage included, stayed, because we felt the PRT, the Protectorate, the Wards program and the teams that draw on us for resources were too important. I’m not here to say one decision was better than the other, or to lay blame with those who sided with her. In coming weeks and months, our capes, accountants and lawyers will be meeting with anyone and everyone in a position of power within the Protectorate program or the PRT, ensuring nothing of this scale occurs again.”

Something moved into my range. An insect. Large.

Atlas.

I moved him experimentally, and felt how incredibly weary he was. His reserves of energy were drained, his body dying. His forelegs touched the walls around him. He’d been placed in the back of a van.

And the occupants of that van – bugs entered open windows to make contact with the others. Lisa, Brian, Alec and Aisha. I could hear the echo, time delayed by five seconds, as they watched Chevalier speak on a tablet PC.

“Alexandria betrayed us on a fundamental level, and the whole cape community has felt that. The public has felt that. I urge people not to blame her. She had no less than eighteen fights against the Simurgh. We had been led to believe her powers rendered her immune, but she was clever enough to hide and alter the evidence. She was a victim, and it’s a testament to her character that she fought off the Simurgh’s influence for as long as she did.”

And there’s the first egregious lie, I thought.

With luck, nobody would believe anyone that was callous enough to point it out. Nobody would want to believe them. It was an ugly thought, that Alexandria could be twisted to act against our interests just because of who she was. She’d worked with Cauldron, had experimented on humans, all in the interest of… what? Creating powers? Selling them?

I swallowed hard. I knew what came next.

“It was due to a concerted effort this evening that we were able to stop Alexandria before more damage could be done.”

Chevalier reached out, put a hand on my shoulder. He drew me closer to him, until I stood in front of him and he had both hands resting on my shoulders.

“Many will recognize Taylor Hebert, revealed to be Skitter in a controversial confrontation at the school just a week ago, a confrontation Alexandria ordered. Taylor Hebert played a crucial role in stopping Alexandria in a moment of crisis, ending the fight.”

And now half the world hates me, I thought, staring forward. The glare was so intense I thought my eyes might start crossing. And the other half… I don’t know what the other half thinks.

I’d agreed to share ‘credit’ for the kill, but only because there had been a consensus that people wouldn’t believe it if I took sole responsibility.

Chevalier wasn’t speaking. I saw a red light go on at the corner of my collar. The microphone Dragon had clipped there was live. The signals would be received by all equipped, official cameras. Something the PRT had arranged for convenience’s sake some time ago.

I had a chance to speak in my own defense, in front of countless tens or hundreds of millions of eyes, and the words were dying in my throat.

My thoughts were grinding to a standstill. What was I supposed to say? We’d barely had any time to prepare. We hadn’t had time to prepare.

There were whole lines I was supposed to give. Ideas I was supposed to express, striking the right tone, and I’d gone blank.

It was a reminder of what my line was supposed to be. I’m not proud, I’m not happy that it came to this…

“It’s not a happy day, but it’s a good day,” he said, skipping ahead two or so minutes. “It marks change, and it marks a step forward. A chance to fight Endbringers and other threats without sabotage, without worrying who stands beside us, or whether our leadership is compromised.”

Dragon’s ships descended from the sky above. My hair and the hood of my sweatshirt flapped as the vessels landed to either side of us. Eleven vessels. The ones we’d destroyed had been rebuilt, updated. Others, old Dragon suits, had apparently been set up with A.I. to fly on their own. They gleamed, various shades of chrome and gunmetal, with trim in different metals and colors for decoration and highlighting.

She had more made, I thought.

“A chance to fight Endbringers without as many casualties,” Chevalier said. “And hope. We’ve investigated the portal to another world, and confirmed that there are resources and even shelter, a possibility of escape in a time of emergency.”

I stared at the van where the Undersiders were.

“And new allies, as unlikely as they might be.”

His hands dropped from my shoulders.

I reached up to the zipper of my sweatshirt. I pulled it down, then shrugged out of it. Chevalier took the piece of clothing in one hand.

I bent over and stepped out of the loose-fitting prison sweats as well.

Defiant handed me my new mask, and I pulled it on. Electric blue lenses, the opposite of the yellow I’d worn before. They helped with the glare, though they weren’t so good against it as my old lenses.

Light gray fabric where I’d had black. Armor panels in the same dark gray as before, albeit with cleaner lines, less bulk, and less in the way of edges. I had no points at the tips of my gloves, and both the mantle around my shoulders and the cloth that hung around my belt were marked with an electric blue border, with my gang emblem in miniature at each corner, flipped upside down so they faced skyward, altered to match my new color scheme.

“I admitted to reprehensible things,” I said. “I won’t challenge that, or pretend I didn’t say or do those things. By all rights, I should go to jail. I may serve a sentence, if the courts will it. I won’t challenge that.”

I paused. For a terrifying moment, I thought I’d forget what to say again. Then I fixed my eyes on the windshield of the van, at the far end of the crowd.

It struck me that I hadn’t suffered stage fright. It had been something else entirely. I hadn’t wanted to speak, because there would be no going back.

When I finally spoke, I didn’t follow the cues I’d been given. My eyes didn’t leave the spot where the Undersiders were watching from.

“I seized a territory in Brockton Bay. I led the local villains, and we defeated all comers. I was secure in my position. I had wealth, friendship, love and respect. People depended on me. It was everything I’d ever wanted, if not quite the way I’d initially imagined it. I could have stayed and been comfortable.

“Except there are bigger things. More important things.”

The eyes and cameras on me made me feel like I was deep in the ocean, a crushing weight pressing down on me.

“I believe in the idea of a new PRT that Chevalier is talking about. I believe in it enough that I was willing to turn myself in and take action to bring it to fruition. That I was willing to leave everything I had behind. If I have to serve time in jail first, then so be it. If I face the Birdcage… I hope I don’t. But at least I could tell myself that seeing the supervillain step up might convince others to come back. Change the minds of heroes who gave up on the PRT for one reason or another.”

A lump welled in my throat. I knew I didn’t have many more words left before I wouldn’t be able to speak.

“This is what I want to do, above all else,” I said, and I said it to the Undersiders. “Given the chance, I’ll serve the people. As I fought Leviathan, the Slaughterhouse Nine and other evils, I’ll fight to the last gasp to protect all of you. When-“

A howling in the distance interrupted me.

Moments later, others took up the cry. Ten dogs, then twenty. Others took up the cry around the city, from various shelters and homes. A hundred, two hundred dogs, and the wolf cub that had started them off.

“-When and if I do take up the job,” I finished, speaking around the growing lump in my throat, “You can call me Weaver.”

Chevalier set a hand on my shoulder.

“That’ll be all,” the hero said. “We’ll have another statement and a conference to answer questions early tomorrow, when we know more for sure.”

The reporters were already calling out questions. Is this the first time you’ve recruited a villain? How did Alexandria die? What crimes did she commit, exactly?

More questions, until it was a jumble.

He led me away, one hand steady and firm on my shoulder, and Miss Militia, Defiant, Dragon and my lawyer fell into step behind us.

I cast one last glance at the van, then entered Dragon’s ship.

“You stumbled,” Defiant said. “Improvised. But that was good.”

I didn’t respond.

“You know you can’t stay here. There’s a conflict of-“

Dragon reached out and pressed an index finger against the ‘mouth’ of his mask.

Then she folded her arms around me. She was cold to the touch, hard and unyielding, but she still managed a motherly embrace.

My face pressed against her shoulder, I found myself glad that my mask hid my face from view.

The door slammed shut as the last of the heroes departed. They joined the PRT uniforms and Wards who had gathered just in front of the elevator, leaving me and my lawyer to talk in private.

It should have been quieter, but things got more disruptive. The moment the door was shut, a handful of seconds passed, and then everyone started talking. Mr. Calle saying something to me, Director Tagg talking to his deputy and Miss Militia, Clockblocker talking with his teammates.

“You created pressure with the deadline, he’s trying to turn it around on you…” Mr. Calle said.

“I know he’s trying to turn it around on me,” I said. I slid forward until I was sitting on the very edge of the chair, my elbows on the table, forehead resting against my hands. “I didn’t think he’d be this stupid, and I kind of hoped someone would speak up, give a little momentum to what I was proposing.”

“People are stupid,” Mr. Calle said. “The question is how we can use that. If we-”

Some heroes simultaneously began to voice their thoughts, to the point that I failed to take any of it in. It was too much. Too much input, all together. I couldn’t track it all. I shut my eyes. “Do me a favor?”

“You’re the client.”

“Five minutes,” I said. “Five minutes to think, with some quiet.”

“Would pen scratches bother you?”

I shook my head.

Mr. Calle didn’t reply to that. Instead, he started writing on a pad of yellow, lined paper, apparently unconcerned that I’d just brushed him off.

“…a hot button for her,” Mrs. Yamada was telling the Director. “It’s a pattern, with the timeline we established. Something happens to her father, and she escalates.”

“Yes,” the Director replied. “But let’s not talk about that here. Not while she could be listening. We give Kid Win’s drones a chance to check us over before talking about any of that…”

“Hunting the Slaughterhouse Nine?” Vista was asking. The Wards were lagging a short distance behind the adult members of the PRT and Protectorate.

“Yeah. As in, step down from her position here, stop the guys who are supposed to end the world,” Clockblocker said.

“She didn’t kill any, did she?” Kid Win asked.

“Grue supposedly killed Burnscar, Piggot killed Crawler and Mannequin, they killed Cherish themselves, basically, Vista finished off Shatterbird after things caved in on them at the Echidna fight… no, Skitter didn’t kill any, I don’t think. She was there, though. Have to give her credit, she made a difference in that last fight with Mannequin and Crawler.”

“Which doesn’t matter,” Tagg said. He’d overheard, it seemed, and stopped at the open elevator door. “Because she also wanted us to condone criminal activity in this city. Think about what that really means. Your careers would be dead in the water once people caught on to the fact that you weren’t going after the real threats. You’d be known for being corrupt. Flechette’s actions threaten to taint this organization for some time to come..”

“It’s not Regent,” Miss Militia said. “The timing doesn’t fit. No, it doesn’t look like it’s a trick. She sent us an email and the details include only things she knows. It feels right.”

There was a pause.

“What happened?” Crucible asked.

“Flechette is stepping down from the Wards program. She is going to be assisting the Undersiders in the future, helping Parian,” Miss Militia said.

“No!” Vista said, raising her voice. “No! She became a villain? What… what the hell!?”

“Vista,” Clockblocker said. “She was in love.”

“She was still one of us. Did you do something?”

I wasn’t sure who she was talking to, until Tagg responded, “No. We didn’t do a thing to her. Everyone that’s been in Brockton Bay over the past weeks and months has dealt with a lot, and I think this is her wrestling with something on her own. I have immense respect for Flechette, and all I can do, all we can do, is hope she comes to her senses.”

“She came from a broken home,” Miss Militia supplied the information instead. “She bounced between her mother, her father and the surrogate mother who had attempted to renege on the deal they’d made and keep her. With the number of times she changed between them and moved, I can’t imagine she has strong ties to the idea of ‘home’. Even within the Wards… New York has five small teams, and she moved between them as she changed residences.”

“She didn’t say anything about that.”

“It didn’t matter in the here and now. Her focus, her path, was school, her career with the Wards. She didn’t have much in the way of roots, but she had direction. I think that the events following the Echidna crisis left her more devastated than she let on.”

“Can I call her?” Vista asked.

“I don’t know if that would be wise,” Miss Militia said.

“Do,” Tagg said. “Remind her what she’s leaving behind, tell her how you feel, then let her be. Too much pressure and she’s liable to be stubborn. Give her time to think, and you may sway her.”

“Okay,” Vista said.

“When you’re done, join the others in discussing battle plans. I’d rather not wait for Skitter’s forces to strike. If it comes down to it, we mobilize first.”

“We’ll be fighting Flechette,” Vista said.

Tagg nodded. “Very possible. If you don’t feel confident you can do it in good conscience, then I won’t make you. In the meantime, I’m requisitioning capes from nearby areas. If it comes down to it, I want to be ready for a fight.”

“And if they don’t give us the chance?” Miss Militia asked.

I missed Tagg’s response. It was monosyllabic.

“If the Undersiders try to avoid direct engagement and attempt to come at us from another angle? Media? Revealing telling details? Financially? Through our families?”

“Oh shit,” Clockblocker said.

“They wouldn’t, would they?” Crucible asked.

“They would,” Kid Win said. “Probably.”

“They would,” Director Tagg agreed. “And I already have ideas in mind. This situation is far from unmanageable. Rest assured. I’ll need to make some calls. Miss Militia, are you up for another walk?”

“Yes.”

Tagg stepped into the elevator, holding the door open. It was too small for everyone to fit inside, but Miss Militia, the deputy and Clockblocker joined him.

Mrs. Yamada started to step inside, then paused while standing in the doorway. “I’ll be in my office all day. If any of you need to talk about Flechette, or anything else that’s going on, come see me.”

There was no reply. There might have been nods, but I didn’t have bugs on top of any of the Ward’s heads.

The doors shut, and a few seconds passed, Kid Win, Crucible and Vista standing in the hallway with a handful of PRT officers.

I waited to see if there was more, but neither she nor her teammates said anything. The drones Kid Win had made were doing a number on my bugs, catching me by surprise when they opened fire with lasers, striking from the other side of the room. It wasn’t easy to avoid them completely, when an exposed bug could get zapped, but keeping my bugs in hiding prevented me from seeing the drones themselves.

Miss Militia left the building, walking. She wasn’t quite out of my range when she made her first call.

“Mr. Hebert?”

I sighed, then shifted position.

“Everything alright?” Mr. Calle asked me. “Needed to get centered?”

“Was listening in,” I said.

“Listening in?”

“I can hear what my insects hear. Tagg is confident. He’s calling in more capes, and preparing for a fight. He’s apparently not too worried about the Undersiders pulling something that isn’t a direct attack, but I don’t know what he’s got in mind, as far as trump cards go. Miss Militia is apparently calling my dad, so Tagg can talk with him.”

“Wonderful,” Mr. Calle said. “Anything else?”

“The Wards are upset over Flechette defecting.”

“Okay. Something to keep in mind. Now, this is difficult to say, but-”

Mr. Calle paused very deliberately.

“What?”

“I would never recommend my clients do anything illegal,” he said.

“But you maybe suspect that if I had any leverage, I should exercise it?”

“I would never say any such thing,” Mr. Calle said. He smiled. “But now that you mention it…”

“There are options,” I said. I thought about the areas of attack that Miss Militia had outlined. Family would cross a line. Something to shake their confidence in the coming conflict. “Can you pass on a message?”

“That would be a mistake, I think. I walk a fine line as it is, and I won’t have a hand in anything direct.”

I frowned.

“Let’s talk about what I can do. First off, I think we should change things up. As it stands, the Protectorate East-North-East holds Brockton Bay in a specialized state of emergency. It’s a legal wild west, with very little precedent holding things together. Director Tagg reports to his superiors, who report to the United States government. This circumvents a great many of the usual checks and balances. Checks and balances I think we should put back into play.”

“How?”

“Contacting the District Attorney and bringing her to the discussion would tie Tagg’s hands, but it would also tie yours. We’d be working entirely within the law, certain items would be taken off the table. You couldn’t ask for condoned villainy, for example. Charges would inevitably move forward against you, but these same things would tie him up in managing things.”

“Doesn’t seem worth it.”

“It depends. It’s… pressure. The Director is focused on a half-dozen things at once. There’s a lot to be said for putting one more thing on his plate. I know he’s not trained in the particulars of law. He’d be forced out of his depth, made to consult others, made to wrap his head around terms he’s not familiar with. It would mandate that you, as a minor, would need a guardian present. Failing that, there’s a great many hoops they’d have to jump through. He’s a soldier. So long as this is a battlefield of some sort, he has a leg up. We can make it something else.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’d be adding pressure, turning things around so he’s the one on his heels, but I’m still not convinced it’s worth the price of admission. Other options?”

“Media.”

“He doesn’t care about image,” I said. “He said he figures it’ll get patched up with good PR in a matter of time, a few days back.”

“It won’t hurt him as badly, then, but he’s more likely to make a mistake if it’s not something he pays attention to.”

“An option,” I said. “It sets a bad tone, though. I’m really looking for cooperation. I’m putting everything on the line in the hopes of getting it. I don’t want them to be enemies, not any more than they are. And I don’t know that just talking to the media is going to be enough to get the results I want.”

“So we need leverage, and it can’t be legal. Going to the District Attorney or the media has drawbacks.”

“Yes.”

“Then I need you to get in contact with Tattletale. Only we’ll be above-board, mostly, about how we handle it. She’s been arranging things for a while. Now it’s time to figure out just how much clout she has. We’ll hit them with the biggest card we have. We’ll make a play for ownership of the portal. Successful or not, it’ll distract them.”

“I’ll do what I can to get in touch with her, then. My firm’s assets will be at your disposal, of course.”

I nodded.

He stood from his seat to make the call. Apparently he didn’t find them much more comfortable than I did. He paced as he waited for the phone to ring. “Cecily? Need you to pull some strings. And route me to someone, best if it’s untraceable.”

It wouldn’t be a direct call. That didn’t make sense. I focused my attention elsewhere in the building. The outlet that fed Kid Win’s anti-bug drones… I found the wiring in the walls and ordered cockroaches to start chewing through it.

Petty, maybe, but I didn’t want to be disarmed, not with the way things were going.

The heroes were returning, Sere and Dovetail entering the lobby. I planted bugs on Dovetail as she made her way indoors, and as discreetly as I was able, I transferred the bugs to Tagg and Miss Militia, who were waiting.

“Tell the others,” Miss Militia said, “Adamant’s getting a cycle retooled to handle more weight before he leaves again. He’ll go with Triumph. Log it all in the system.”

“Will do,” Dovetail said. Miss Militia patted her on the shoulder as she made her way inside.

Miss Militia and Tagg remained in the lobby, by the hallway to the elevators. They didn’t say much. A few words on degrees of lethal force, but no camraderie, not even much in the way of small talk.

My cockroaches found their way through the wire, and promptly died as they came in contact with the live circuit. A breaker blew, but Kid Win didn’t seem to react.

Hopefully the drones wouldn’t get a chance to recharge.

A few minutes passed, as my lawyer got in touch with someone, and started talking about media contacts. Then my father arrived.

I could sense him as he got out of a truck in the parking lot, making his way inside.

“Mr. Hebert,” Miss Militia said, extending a hand.

My dad shook it.

“Thank you for coming in again,” Director Tagg said. He extended a hand. Again, my father shook it.

“My office?” Tagg asked.

My dad nodded.

My pulse was pounding as Miss Militia, Tagg and my father entered the elevator and made their way upstairs.

“She’s here?” my dad asked.

“In a room downstairs with her lawyer,” Miss Militia answered.

“She hired him herself?”

“I imagine she did,” Miss Militia said. “With the speed he pulled things together, I suspect she may have more working in the background. Crime does pay, if she’s paying their salaries. They’re apparently top of the line, as parahuman defense attorneys go.”

“I can’t believe this is all real.”

“It is,” Miss Militia said. “It’s very real.”

“And very real blood will be shed tonight,” Tagg said, “If we can’t rein her in.”

I didn’t sense it, but my bugs could hear papers rustle. I might not have identified the sound if I hadn’t had the context.

A few long seconds passed, and I could hear the rustling again. The turning of a page.

I clenched my fist.

“Problem?” Mr. Calle asked, covering the mouthpiece of his phone.

“My dad’s here. They’ve got him in Tagg’s office, and they’re filling him in on their version of events.”

“Right. Let’s put a stop to that. I’ll be back.”

Phone still pressed to his ear, he picked up his briefcase, tapping on the door three times with the side of his shoe.

A PRT uniform unlocked and opened the door, and my lawyer strode out. It shut behind him.

Upstairs, my dad turned another page.

He was reading through it all. All the details I’d gone over with my lawyer, only without my feedback, without my voice to point out the places where they were going a little overboard, naming charges they could throw at me, without checking whether they could stick. Not that the difference was that big, comparing what I’d actually done to what they were accusing me of.

I heard the sound of him flipping through the last few pages before he dropped the pad on the table. “Okay.”

“She’s in a lot of trouble,” Tagg said.

“This isn’t news to me,” my dad answered, his voice quiet.

“If the charges went through, she would face being charged as an adult. The three strikes protection act wouldn’t mitigate things. I’d say the worst case scenario is execution, or indefinite detention in the Birdcage, but the best case scenario for her isn’t much better.”

My dad didn’t reply to that.

“Her power means we can’t keep her in a conventional prison. She’s too flexible, too versatile for us to use any of our current means of keeping her from using her ability. Even today, contained in a cell, she’s been literally ‘bugging’ us to track our movements and listen in on conversations. We had our tinker put together a countermeasure, but it’s not perfect.”

Again, my dad was silent.

“I have two daughters. Four and six years older than Taylor,” the Director said. “I can’t imagine.”

“I can’t either,” my dad said. “Like I said, it doesn’t feel real.”

“I’d like you to come with me the next time I speak to your daughter.”

“She didn’t listen to me before, she won’t listen now,” my dad said.

“I didn’t ask you to come because I thought you could convince her,” Tagg said. “You don’t have to say anything, as a matter of fact.”

What was he up to?

My lawyer had reached the top floor, and was striding between cubicles and desks. He raised his voice to ask a question I couldn’t make out, and someone answered him. He altered his course slightly in response, walked with more purpose, directly for Tagg, Miss Militia and my father.

“I’d like to talk to her alone,” my dad said.

“We can arrange that,” Tagg said.

I clenched my fists. Using my dad as a pawn? Damn right I was going to escalate. Which, I suspected, was exactly what Tagg was aiming to achieve. This was something to put me off balance, just like we were looking to do to him by way of leveraging control of the portal.

My lawyer knocked on the door and then opened it without waiting for a response. “My client would like a word.”

“Of course,” Tagg said. As the four of them exited his office and made their way to the elevator, I turned the two words around in my head. Had he sounded sarcastic? Did he simply expect me to interrupt?

I couldn’t say. I could only wait as they made their way downstairs. I was stuck, my back hurting where my arms were in a more or less fixed position. I stood, stretched as well as I was able, tossed my head to one side in an attempt to get my hair out of my face. When that didn’t work, I bent over and lowered my face to my hands to tidy my hair.

“Yes,” he said. I could feel alarm sing through me, inexplicable, but jarring. Then he seemed to change his mind, “No.”

And the emotion that hit me at that was just as strong as that misplaced sense of alarm.

Damn Tagg. Damn him for bringing my dad into this.

The four of them stopped outside of the cell. Miss Militia used her phone to unlock it, and Tagg gestured for my dad to enter.

I saw him hesitate as he stepped into the room, dark sheet metal, a reflective pane of one-way glass, the metal table bolted to the floor, my handcuffs, locked to the table in turn. Me, with my hair in some disarray, a touch damp from the shower and ineffectual toweling, from sweat, in my black uniform with the word ‘villain’ marked clearly across it.

I could see it, his expression changing, the disbelief he’d professed to becoming something else entirely.

His feelings were as mixed as mine. I could tell just by looking at him, by imagining what he’d been through, the person standing by, dealing with the aftermath of everything I’d done. His frustration, his confusion, pain, and embarrassment. His loneliness, disappointment, his fear.

And, somehow, as though it were too much to bottle in, it seemed to boil over in the form of one singular emotion. I could see his jaw shift as he clenched his teeth, met my eyes and looked away. The sudden agitation that seemed to grip him, as he opened and closed his fists.

Tagg and Miss Militia had reached the interior of the room on the other side of the one way mirror, while Mr. Calle stood in the hallway, speaking on the phone. I stood from the chair as my dad approached, his body language making it all too clear what he was about to do. Miss Militia took one look and reacted, turning around to hurry back out of the room, to intervene. Tagg said something, two words I couldn’t be bothered to decipher, and she stopped in her tracks.

My dad raised his hand, palm open, and I closed my eyes, lifting my chin to take the hit.

It didn’t come. My dad wrapped his arms around my shoulders instead. I squeaked, and I couldn’t say whether it was because he was squeezing me too tight or if it was because of an overflow of emotion similar to the one he’d just displayed. I stood there, unable to return the hug with the way I was cuffed to the table, unable to speak around the lump in my throat.

When minutes passed and we hadn’t exchanged a single word, Tagg and Miss Militia stepped out of the observation room, signaling Mr. Calle.

“Let’s talk,” Tagg said.

I broke away from my dad. Blinked where there were tears in the corners of my eyes. I didn’t care if Tagg saw.

“You’ve informed me that your teammates, many of whom are known murderers, are going to declare war against the PRT in three hours and twenty minutes, without word from you.”

My dad took a seat to my left, watching me carefully.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’ve described them as unpredictable. They’re undeniably dangerous. You think they’ll hurt people. They’ll pull out all the stops, to get you back, and to hurt us. The good guys.”

“Yes,” I said, not taking my eyes off Tagg. “But I don’t think you’re a good guy, Director.”

“I don’t think you’re a good person either,” Tagg said, “and the court of public opinion is likely to agree with me before they agree with you.”

“Let’s not resort to name calling this early in the discussion,” Mr. Calle said.

“Right,” Tagg said, “It wastes time, and you have very little.”

“Neither of us want this to happen, Director,” I said. “Neither of us have time, and neither of us want a war. Except maybe you do. Maybe you think you’d win, and it’d be a bump in the PRT’s ratings.”

“No,” he said, “I think, like any altercation, both sides would lose something. But let’s talk about your terms. You want amnesty for your criminal friends?’

I was acutely aware of my dad watching me.

“Yes,” I said.

“You want to depose me, raising Miss Militia to my place, and in the doing, force the PRT to relinquish all ideas of humans governing parahumans, to help keep those with incredible power in check.”

“Yes.”

“And you wanted me to allow you to become an official vigilante, leaving your group behind while you worked to hunt down psychopaths with powers. I’ve explained why that can’t happen. I’m not sure if you intend to change your demands, or-”

“I’ll go to the Birdcage if I have to,” I said. “Because the rest of it, I believe in it enough to make the sacrifice.”

“Taylor,” my dad said. The first words he’d said to me since the breakfast we’d had together, on the day I’d been outed. “Why?”

“Because we’re losing. We’re so focused on the little things, on petty squabbles and factions and vendettas, that we’re losing against the real dangers. The Class S threats. The fact that the world’s going to end in a year and eleven months. Did you hear about that?”

He shook his head. “I… I read the letter you left me, at Annette’s grave. Realized it was probably what you were trying to write, the night you left. Before you changed your mind.”

The night I left, so long ago. When I’d first met Coil.

“A lot of what I did, it was to stop the man who really wanted to take over the city. Who would have been far worse than any of us Undersiders. And I did that because he had a little girl captive. Dinah Alcott. She could see the future, and she says the world ends in two years.”

My dad shook his head, “No.”

“Yes. The heroes know it. It’s a big part of why the PRT is falling apart. You’ve heard about that on the news?”

“I… some. But I haven’t paid much attention since I found out that you-”

“That I’m a supervillain,” I said.

He flinched visibly at that.

“Interesting,” Tagg cut in. “That you call yourself that. You say you’ve had justifications for what you’ve done, but you call yourself a villain.”

I wanted to hit him, for cutting into my conversation with my dad, for polluting my attempts to explain things.

“I am,” I told him. “I’ve done bad things.”

“Left a trail of devastation in your wake.”

“Yes,” I said. “And I’m willing to pay the price. I’ll go to the Birdcage, a place you described as a literal hell on Earth. A place where people just as scary as the ones I’ve spent the last few months fighting stay. A place where some of those very people are currently imprisoned. Lung, Bakuda, Trickster. They probably want to inflict fates worse than death on me. But I’ll do it. Because I really truly believe the world needs the PRT, or a PRT, one without lunatics like you in charge, and maybe bringing me in helps keep a handful more capes in the roster, keeps my friends secure where they are, so they can help.”

I was heated, my words angry.

“Your friends,” he said.

“My friends.”

“That’s the rapist, Jean-paul? Alec? A murderer.”

“Regent. He was the son of a supervillain, screwed from the get go, and yeah, maybe some shady stuff went down, way back then. I think he’s… not in love, but he’s close to Imp. Somewhere between love and friendship, maybe.”

“Imp. She’s the one who makes it a game, to psychologically and mentally torture gang members who step foot in her territory, until they have mental break downs.”

“Yes,” I said, through grit teeth. “It’s more complicated than that, she’s been through a lot, but yes. And I heard directly from people who were grateful to her for scaring off the real rapists and murderers.”

He didn’t pay me any mind. “Who else is there? Hellhound.”

“She prefers Bitch,” I said. “But she’s Rachel to me.”

“Who had her monster dogs chew up innocents who’d gotten in her way.”

“It was a bad time for her. Weren’t you just excusing Flechette, because we’ve all been through some shit? I know Rachel as the person who takes care of wayward souls, grown men and children who are lost in a way even we can’t fathom, with the things we’ve been through.”

“And Grue? Do tell me how you see him.”

“I liked him,” I said. “If I’d stayed with them, maybe he and I would have tried to make it work.”

“Romance.”

I met my dad’s eyes. His forehead was creased with worry. My power was buzzing around the periphery of my consciousness.

I found refuge in the bugs, paid attention to their movements as they avoided the remaining drones, found my center, so to speak. Calm. He wants me upset.

“Romance,” I said. “He was my rock, when I needed a rock. And I was his, when-”

“When he snapped,” Tagg cut in.

“It wasn’t like that.”

“He was the stable one, until he wasn’t stable,” Tagg said. “Until he killed Burnscar. Yet I suspect he’s the one in charge, now that you’ve left?”

“Yes,” I said. “And with the dozens, hundreds of people I’ve tried to take care of or whose lives I’ve saved, I trust Grue to look after them and keep the peace. I wouldn’t give him that responsibility, with all the time and effort I’ve invested in them, if I didn’t trust him.”

“Very generous,” Tagg told me. “And Tattletale. Where do I even start?”

“With the fact that she was my best friend. That she’s maybe our best bet at understanding what’s going on? Understanding the Endbringers and what they’re doing? Understanding powers? Finding the Nine before they bring about the end of the world? Understanding how the world ends?”

“All of this, from the girl who used her power to convince her brother to kill himself, before fleeing, spending years on the streets, stealing wallets and using the account numbers to take whole fortunes?”

“All wrong,” I said.

“And who planted the seeds that led to Panacea breaking down and mutilating her sister.”

“Those seeds were planted a long time before we talked to Panacea,” I said.

This was what Tagg had wanted. He’d devastated my defenses, bringing my dad into this.

My dad glanced at me, then looked at the Director. “I know less about them than either of you.”

“That’s not important,” the Director said. “I just want you to answer one question for me. Assume we’re both right. Me and your daughter. Assume that they’re everything we described them as. Do you really want them in control of this city’s underworld?”

Again, my dad looked at me.

“No need to double-check with your daughter. I’m wanting your honest opinion, as a man on the streets, from someone who has to live in this city without any real say over what happens in the cape-on-cape fights and politics. Do you really want them in charge?”

“No,” my dad said.

I did my best not to show it, but the word was like a punch in the gut.

“I’m sorry, Taylor, but-”

“Are they really that much worse than the ABB? Than Empire Eighty-Eight?”

“With them, we…” my dad trailed off.

“With them, we could pretend things weren’t bad!” I said, “But they were worse. You know they were worse. The people you worked with, the addicts, the people without money…”

“No. I think you’re wrong there,” my dad told Tagg. “She has support. When you attacked her in the school, there were people who stood by her. If I’m being honest, I don’t get it, I don’t want those people in charge, but I don’t want any villains in charge. I don’t understand the politics behind this, or the context, but I trust my daughter.”

“Of course you trust your daughter. The curse of being a parent, I know it well.”

“You wanted my opinion,” my dad said, his voice a little firmer, “You get my opinion. Others believe in her. I trust her, even if I don’t know enough to follow what this is all about. Even if I barely feel like I know her right now, I can look her in the eye and know that’s the same girl I’ve spent the last sixteen years with. With some of the worst qualities of my wife and I, and a lot more of the better ones.”

“I wonder how long that opinion will hold,” Tagg said. “Because we have, what is it? Three hours and a handful of minutes? Then the war she set in motion hits this city.”

“It can be avoided,” I said.

“If we cave in to your extortion,” Tagg said. “Except you think too small, Skitter. It’s a common flaw among teenagers, however powerful they are. They attend high school, and all they can see is the school, their peers. Tunnel vision. You’re the same. You’re focused on this city, but you don’t see what happens elsewhere. You don’t see the ramifications.”

“Which are?”

“You’d be strengthening the PRT a little in the short-term, but the long-term? Letting villains take charge, taking the humans out of the PRT, condoning villainy? It would doom us all. What you’re threatening us with? It’s only one fight. And maybe it’s ugly, but it’s one fight. If they kill us, if they become monsters of the Slaughterhouse Nine’s caliber to defeat us, then we win. Your side wins the battle, loses the war. If you don’t go that far? If you leave us in a state to recover? We pick ourselves up and we lick our wounds, and then we rebuild.”

Tagg cupped his hands, moving them as if balancing a scale. “One fight, one set of casualties in one area of one medium-sized city, compared to consequences that reach across North America? Across the world? It doesn’t measure up.”

I glanced at my lawyer.

“You don’t have an answer for me?” Tagg asked.

“I have one,” I said. I hope.

Mr. Calle looked at his phone, then gave me one curt nod.

“What?” Tagg asked.

“It’s in the news,” Mr. Calle said.

Tagg and Miss Militia simultaneously reached for their smartphones. I was probably as tense as they were, as they thumbed past the security screens and found news sites. Miss Militia was a few seconds faster than Tagg.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“It’s all legitimate,” I said. “I’m pretty sure. Legal enough.”

“What is it?” my dad asked.

“Property,” I said. “I expect a great amount of property just changed hands.”

“Who’s Sierra Kiley?” Miss Militia asked.

It was all I could do to keep from smiling with joy. Of all the people to serve as a public face, Tattletale had found Sierra. Someone I owed, in many ways. Someone who’d, maybe, followed recent events and rethought her initial doubts.

“No idea,” I said, maintaining my poker face.

“I don’t understand,” my dad said.

“Quite simple,” Mr. Calle told him. “I believe the PRT has become aware that properties in a wide area around the portal in downtown Brockton Bay, previously under the control of various individuals and groups, just exchanged hands, finding itself in the hands of one singular individual.”

“And that one individual is in thrall to the villains who control this town,” Tagg said.

“I resent the notion,” I told him, and I allowed myself a small smile. “But it would be amusing, if it were true. You might even have to rethink what you were saying about how narrow my worldview is. I mean, that’s a whole other world. Anything but narrow, when you think about it.”

“You’re not as clever as you think you are,” he said.

“Probably not,” I said.

“You’re playing out your hand.”

“And you’re bringing my family into this. Remember how our little feud started? You crossed the line. You made the call to out me, because you wanted me in custody. Congratulations, you got me in custody. You broke the unwritten rules, because you think that you don’t have to obey them, since you aren’t a cape. Except you’re forgetting why they exist in the first place. The rules keep the game afloat. They keep everything afloat, at the core of it. We all know the PRT is a sinking ship. You don’t agree with what I’m doing? Fine. But at least I’m trying to keep it afloat.”

“And you?” my dad asked. It took me a second to realize he was looking at Miss Militia.

“What about me?” she asked.

“You’ve been quiet. Are you here just in case my daughter turns violent?”

“No. She’s not violent. Not in that sense.”

“You don’t have anything to say?”

“As grateful as I am for the right to free speech,” Miss Militia said, “I’m grateful for the right to silence as well.”

“Then you don’t agree with your Director?”

“I didn’t say that. What I’m saying is that there’s no right answer here, and I’m glad I don’t have to be the one to make the decision.”

“Isn’t that cowardly?” I asked.

“No. It’s human, to not want to make the hard choices,” she said. She raised one boot off the ground and placed it on the corner of her chair. “And it’s good strategy to conserve your strength.”

“We’re not fighting,” I said. “We’re not going to get tired.”

“Physically?” she asked. “No. Emotionally? Mentally? Yes.”

“You’re anticipating the fight,” I said. “You don’t think there’ll be a consensus in time.”

She shook her head, then used one hand to fix her hair, tucking it behind one ear. “No. I don’t think there will be a fight. I hope there’ll be a consensus, but it’s not necessary. Your ploys with the portal, controlling the territory around it, it’s clever, it’ll take a lot of time before we can pass legislation or conduct a thorough enough investigation to justifiably seize it. But I’m not worried about that, either, nor am I concerned about the damage Tattletale could do in other areas.”

“Then why do you need to conserve your strength?” I asked.

“Because we’re dealing with the devil,” Miss Militia said. “I’m angry at you, Taylor, and half of that is because you put us in this situation, a set of circumstances where we’re liable to lose either way. Because I agree with the conclusions you came to, how the PRT is needed, the need for compromise, and because I can’t condone how you approached those conclusions.”

She shifted position, and the black-green energy of her flickered from her right hip to her right hand, appearing in her hand, amorphous and shapeless, as if searching for a form to take. When she didn’t grasp it, it darted to her left hip, and the metal of a cutlass clinked against her seat.

“But I really hate you because we had to call her,” Miss Militia intoned.

Her?

Tagg looked at his phone. “Assuming she’s on time, it’ll be less than ten minutes.”

“Her?” my dad asked.

“You’ve played your part,” Tagg responded. “Go. It’d be better in the long run. Wash your hands of this, leave. Your daughter’s in custody, she’s going to one prison or another. You can go home and know that it was inevitable, and that this was the best outcome. It takes a few years maybe, but you lament your mistakes, and you eventually make an uneasy peace with what happened to your daughter.”

“And if I stay?”

“You won’t have any of that peace of mind,” Tagg said, and that was all.

My dad looked at me, “I think you’re wrong. Everything before this, it was the times where I thought I had to walk away, look away, times where I thought things were inevitable, that I regretted the most.”

He took my hand. “I’ll stay.”

“Thank you,” I murmured the words.

Our guest didn’t arrive right away. It might have been fitting, in a dramatic way, for her to appear as we finished our dialogue, but things weren’t so carefully orchestrated in the real world.

“Those things they said you did?” my dad murmured.

“Mostly true,” I said.

He squeezed my hand for a moment, but it wasn’t reassuring. Something else. Concern, maybe, channeled through a simple gesture. Concern for me, for what I’d become.

I wanted nothing more than for my dad and I to talk for a month straight, just to hash things out, to form some kind of balance, some semblance of a connection like we’d once had. Instead, there was only this, like the father-daughter relationship distilled. Not enough communication, barely any familiarity, both of us flooded with very different sorts of fear, confusion, and frustration. I imagined it was much like the bonds that had kept primitive families together in an era when living from week to week was a challenge. Basic, crude, but almost primeval.

She arrived, minutes later. A woman, tall, in a suit, carrying nothing with her. I sensed her at the periphery of my range, walking with a steady, strong stride.

I was reminded of the Siberian, almost. The way she moved with the confidence of the indomitable, the way that she was almost careful as she moved among people. Except that where the Siberian was only careful among her teammates, this woman was careful with everybody.

It took her five minutes to reach us, walking through the crowds, using the pedestrian crossings.

But the person I found myself comparing her to, as she approached the PRT building, wasn’t the Siberian. It was me. She reached her home ground, and people started to recognize her. They reacted, moving out of her way. Showing respect. Showing fear, in some cases.

Three of the Wards were in the elevator when it stopped at the ground floor. Kid Win was taking his drone recharge station apart, which meant it was just Clockblocker, Crucible and Vista that crossed paths with her.

The Wards took only a moment to recognize her as she entered the elevator, and the two native Brocktonites left, pulling a protesting, confused Crucible after them.

In a matter of a minute, she was opening the door to the cell. A woman, the sort who could be forty but looked like she was in her late twenties. Hispanic, insofar as that was a descriptor, with darker skin and long, straight black hair.

But more than her description, the part of her that hit me was her presence. Almost without thinking about it, I got out of my chair, standing, the chains of my cuffs pulling taut against the lock on the table. My lawyer, Miss Militia and Tagg all stood, my dad a step behind them, bewildered. The only one not in the know.

“Chief Director,” I said.

“Deputy Chief. I’ve stepped down from my position, but I still have to train my replacement,” she said, her gaze piercing through me. I couldn’t even tell that one of her eyes was a prosthetic. “And seeing to some leftover crises. Hello, Ms. Hebert.”

She extended a hand. As though driven to accept the handshake by a peculiar gravity, I extended my own hand and shook it. Her firm grip could have pulverized me. I might have been less intimidated if I were trapped in a small pen with an angry bull elephant.

“And Mr. Danny Hebert,” she said. She shook my father’s hand.

Tagg stood from the chair at the table and moved over one left, leaving the seat for his superior. “Since you’ve made up your mind about staying, you’ll need to know. This is Deputy Chief Director Costa-Brown of the PRT.”

My father nodded. I was getting the feeling he was almost shell-shocked. To find out about the end of the world, the situation his daughter was in, and countless other things, the name of this woman might not have even processed for him.

I remained where I was, hands folded on the back of my head, kneeling, while the PRT officers bellowed at me, almost incoherent, impossible to obey as they gave me contradictory orders. Down on the ground, stand up, throw any weapons to the side, do not touch anything.

They were afraid to approach, too, apparently. Maybe word had gotten out about what happened to Armsmaster when he’d gotten ahold of me at the fundraiser. They each stopped about ten feet from me, forming a loose ring. I’d thought they might have hit me with one of their nonlethal weapons, but they didn’t shoot. Maybe the audience was giving them second thoughts.

Miss Militia broke the stalemate, such as it was. I could see her put one hand on Clockblocker’s shoulder, giving him a gentle push.

In his white costume, he advanced. He was inscribed with images of clocks in gray, some animated, little hands spinning at different speeds at his shoulder, the center of his chest, and the backs of his hands, places where the armor panels were broadest. He crossed the perimeter of guards, getting closer to me.

When I didn’t react, they seemed to take that as permission to move closer. The bellowing reached a crescendo, and one officer was apparently unhappy that I wasn’t already lying prone on the ground. He planted a heavy boot between my shoulder blades, then thrust me into the ground. I only barely managed to turn my head to avoid cracking my chin on the floor, pulling my head back so I didn’t smash it. I felt the air huff out of my chest, pain jolting through me. My chest wasn’t large, was a ways from ‘medium’, even, but that didn’t make it any better when it bore the brunt of the impact.

The other guards were alternately herding the civilians out of the area or forming a wall to keep them from watching.

“Hey!” Clockblocker said. “That’s enough. I got this.”

The shouting stopped. There was only the noise of the guards on the far ends of the room, giving orders to tourists and staff members, taking charge of the situation and escorting people out.

I had to twist my head to look up at Clockblocker. For his part, he stared down at me, his expression hidden by the featureless white pane of his mask.

“This is a trick,” he said.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “But not the way you’re thinking.”

He didn’t respond to that.

“Do you need me to take a different position?” I asked.

“Once upon a time, I would have had something clever to say in response to that,” he said, quiet.

“What?”

“Nevermind. Kneel, with your arms behind you.”

I moved slowly, so I wouldn’t provoke any rash actions from the uniforms, climbing to my knees, then extending my arms behind me.

He reached out and touched the top of my head.

What felt like an instant later, my arms were weighed down. Clockblocker was behind me, his hand on the heavy metal restraints to keep them from slamming into my tailbone. Everyone else in the lobby had moved. The Wards filled the area, along with the members of the Protectorate, new and old. Flechette was only a short distance away, while Miss Militia stood just beside Clockblocker. Even heroes that had presumably been on patrol were back, along with more PRT members than I’d counted in the building when I’d surrendered.

Tagg was there too, flanked by two PRT uniforms and one man who was wearing a suit, rather than a uniform. The deputy director?

I’d lost control of my bugs while I’d been timed out. In many cases, it wasn’t a problem. Still, I’d lost the ability to track most of those who were present, as mosquitoes, flies and ants went about their merry way.

“Stand,” Miss Militia told me.

I tried to stand, but found more restraints on my ankles. They were connected to the massive metal handcuffs I wore, which only made an awkward setup worse.

“Clockblocker,” Miss Militia said. She reached under one of my arms. Clockblocker took her cue and did the same. Together, they hauled me to my feet. They stayed beside me, holding my arms, as they led me past all of the gathered heroes and PRT officers. All people I’d hurt, people I’d humiliated.

I had no friends here.

Director Tagg was lighting up a cigarette, despite the prominent ‘no smoking’ signs nearby. As I passed, he gave me a hard stare, heavily lined eyes glaring beneath thick black eyebrows, his face otherwise expressionless. He pointed, and a PRT uniform joined our group.

Miss Militia handed me off to Triumph, and he helped Clockblocker lead me through the corridor to the PRT elevator. The doors whisked shut, sealing the four of us inside.

Damn, these handcuffs were uncomfortable. They had to be a design meant for the heavy hitters, for capes who could rend steel with their bare hands. Was it spite that made them use these cuffs?

They weren’t reading me my rights. Was there a reason? I might have asked, but I didn’t want to show ignorance. Better to be confident, to act as if I knew exactly what was going on.

Above us, Tagg extinguished his cigarette, barely touched, fished in a nearby trashcan for a soda can, and dropped the butt inside before disposing of it.

I couldn’t quite make out his words. Not enough bugs in position. “- now. PRT-”

All of the capes mobilized, joining Tagg and his immediate underlings in entering the stairwell. The PRT moved as well, but in a wholly different direction. They were taking defensive positions, leaders barking out orders.

I couldn’t be absolutely sure, given how little I knew about guns, but I was pretty sure the PRT was packing more in the way of lethal weapons than they had been on my last visit.

The elevator stopped, so gently I might have missed it if my bugs didn’t give me perspective on a larger scale. We stepped out into a brightly lit hallway.

“This is an E-type containment cell. Countermeasures include containment foam and these beauties,” Triumph said.

Beauties?

He was pointing up. I followed the direction and looked. Spheres the size of beach balls, chrome, with small windows on the bottom. Familiar.

“Touch the door, make too much noise or use your power, and the room gets flooded with an electric charge,” Triumph explained. “Calculated so it’s only a little less powerful than it’d need to be to do permanent damage. Push it any further and the room is flooded with containment foam. The same measures are packed into this whole hallway.”

Ah. They were the same devices that had been loaded into the drones that one of Dragon’s suits had deployed.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t plan on escaping.”

“What are you planning?” Clockblocker asked.

“Don’t engage her,” Triumph said. He brought us to a stop by one metal door. There was a letter etched on the surface of the metal, a large ‘E’, and smaller codes in boxes beside it. M-21, CC-2, Bat-4

He tapped his phone against the wall, and two sets of metal doors slid open. Very similar to the elevator. Same design?

Thick walls, I noted. The walls that framed the door were a foot and a half deep. It somehow made the small cell a little more claustrophobic. It was daunting as it was, six feet by six feet, with sheet metal laid out over the floor and walls, welded together where they joined, with openings cut in where necessary. There was a vent above me, pumping in a constant flow of fresh air, a little too cold, and another vent beneath the bed, blocked off by a grid of metal bars that extended between the bed and the floor.

The bed itself featured a mattress no thicker than my hand, covered in plastic and laid out on an arrangement of metal strips that wove into one another. The ‘toilet’ wasn’t a toilet at all, but looked to be a urinal, horizontal and sunken into the ground, a shallow chrome basin with a drain and three thick buttons where it met the wall. On the opposite wall, a television was set into the wall, protected by a clear pane. I didn’t see controls or anything resembling a remote.

Above me, another one of those beachball-sized orbs was embedded into the ceiling. Ominous.

Everything was sealed and reinforced twice over. Everything but the vents, but they were too small to crawl through. Was this the kind of cell they put Lung in? With all the metal and the relatively meager amounts of cloth, I didn’t imagine even his pyrokinesis would do much, unless he’d grown considerably.

I turned around to look at my three escorts, and noted that Clockblocker and Triumph had backed off. It was just the PRT uniform, now.

I felt a moment’s trepidation. Was this the point where the PRT officer beat me within an inch of my life, while everyone else turned a blind eye?

“Kit, and one bundle,” the PRT told Clockblocker. I was surprised to note that it was a woman’s voice, behind the featureless helmet. The junior hero hurried off to the end of the hall opposite the elevator. She wrenched me around until my back was to her, then bent down to remove the leg restraints. Triumph stared at me, arms folded, while she did it, the threat implicit. She removed my hand restraints as well, then handed the gear to the hero.

The officer stepped into the cell with me, and the door shut behind her. “Clothes off.”

Oh. Worse than a beating, then.

I tried to tell myself to stay calm, to not be embarrassed. This was a combination of procedure and psychology. They wanted me off guard, feeling vulnerable. In the time Clockblocker had me on pause, Tagg had likely outlined orders to this extent.

I kicked off my shoes, removed my top and running pants, folded them, and set them aside. There were no shelves, so I left them in one corner of the room.

The PRT officer undid the neat folding, rifling through pockets for something, anything, then left my clothes in a heap.

Once I had my underwear off, she checked it, then gave me my next order. “Glasses.”

I removed my glasses and handed them over. She turned them over in her hands, twisted and manhandled them until I worried the frames would snap.

“Shower. Rinse off until I say stop.”

I gave her a quizzical look, and she pointed.

I crossed the room to investigate. Above the toilet, there was an opening in the wall, about four feet above the ground.

“Three buttons,” the uniform said. “Flush, sink and shower. Squat to use the bathroom, get on all fours or squat to shower. If the screen flashes yellow and beeps, that means cameras are going on and someone’s got something to say to you. You’ll have six seconds to finish your business and cover up. Screen flashes red, beeps twice, it means door’s opening. Again, six seconds to cover up.”

A little inhumane, I thought. Would that be more psychological pressure? Regular visits? Interrupting my sleep? Unreliable privacy?

“Rinse,” she repeated.

Maybe Tagg wants me to snap and attack her, I mused.

But I did as she’d asked. The spray was lukewarm, and the stream was directed into the toilet, using the same drain, which made it awkward to get underneath without actually crouching in the toilet itself. That was only compounded by the fact that the vent was still blasting in cool air, chilling the parts of me that weren’t immediately under the stream.

I grit my teeth, told myself that Lung had probably dealt with it, wedging his six-foot-plus frame beneath the stream. It would have been worse for him, being larger, blind, missing something between the legs. Except he maybe hadn’t had a guard in the room with him. Too dangerous.

For an instant, I wished I had enough of a reputation that this woman wouldn’t be there, watching me.

The door opened partway, while I stood there dripping. She was kind enough to block the opening with her body, so I didn’t flash the two young heroes.

She threw a bundle onto the bed. A towel? Clothes?

I started to move towards it and she barked out, “Stop.”

Apparently I wasn’t allowed to dress. She had more things in her hands. A tool kit. She fished out a set of sterile gloves. “Allergies?”

“I’m allergic to bee stings,” I said, trying to inject some levity into the proceedings. I couldn’t see her expression.

Damn it. I was wet, beaded with moisture, my hair clinging to my scalp, and doing my best not to shiver as I cursed the cold air that flooded the room. I used my fingers and fingernails to comb my hair back away from my face.

“Latex allergy?”

“No,” I said, “And I was joking about the bee stings.”

Not even a recognition of the joke. “Are you on any medications?”

“No.”

“Birth control?”

“No.” Condoms, I thought.

“Two ways we can do this. You cooperate, takes five to ten minutes to do a full search. You fail to cooperate, if you fight me, bite or struggle, I step outside and we turn on the countermeasure, and then do a search while you’re incapacitated.”

Her head lifted fractionally, as if she was glancing up at the electricity-dispensing orb above.

“I’ll cooperate,” I said.

Oh, how glad I was, that I could focus my power elsewhere, distract myself.

Tagg had arranged everyone in a conference room upstairs. The heroes, suits and uniforms I presumed were key members of the PRT, and one or two more, who sat a distance away from the Director and his people.

“Plans,” Tagg said, “Go.”

“We bring Defiant and Dragon in,” Miss Militia said. “They ship her to another PRT office where we can hold her until a trial.”

“We can’t act until we know what she’s doing,” another cape said. A woman with a high collar. Dovetail. “What’s her plan?”

There was a silence.

“Thoughts, Miss Militia?” Tagg asked.

“She’s… intelligent. In every case we’ve crossed paths with her, she’s proved resourceful. She was confident and self-assured when she turned herself in. Whatever this maneuver is, it was calculated.”

“Mrs. Yamada?” Tagg asked one of the people in suits at the far end of the table.

“I’ve read up on her, studied the records you have of her, talked to the students that knew her best, for better or worse. Greg Veder, Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess, Madison Clements… her teachers, her father… I’m not so convinced.”

“You disagree with Miss Militia?”

“I can’t say for sure without talking to the girl, but actual surrender isn’t impossible, given my understanding of her.”

“She could be attempting to bring down the PRT,” Assault said. “Do it from within. With the charges we have lined up against her, she can request a jury trial. She uses that as a platform to dish out dirty secrets. Confidential data on Armsmaster, details from records they stole from the database, the Echidna event and the fallout therein…”

“Given how that’s gone,” Dovetail said, “She’d be digging her own grave. We all thought the details would leak, but Cauldron’s cleanup is efficient. Anyone who tries to leak details gets… censored.”

“Killed,” Adamant clarified. “Or disappeared.”

“It would be unfortunate if she were killed in our custody,” Tagg said. “She’d be safer in the Birdcage.”

“With the public support she has within the city?” Miss Militia asked. “Good luck getting her there without a fair trial. There’s going to be a lot of eyes on this.”

“So she’s forcing our hand,” Tagg said. “The question is why.”

“To oust you,” Miss Militia said.

“Revenge?” Tagg asked.

“I don’t know, but I had a conversation with her a few days ago, and she said she had something in mind that she could use against you. I didn’t know what it was before now.”

“I see,” Tagg said, rubbing his chin.

Back in the cell, I sighed. I could see the uniform flinch in reaction. She had her fingers in my mouth, feeling beneath my tongue and around the base of my gums. When I didn’t bite like she’d feared, she finished and removed her fingers from my mouth. She removed the gloves, where they joined the first pair she’d donned.

Miss Militia had told Tagg. I wasn’t surprised; she gave me the impression of someone who followed the letter of the law. As willing as she’d been to open negotiations, she would still do what it took to keep her job and maintain the peace.

I was maybe a little disappointed. I hadn’t demanded she keep it a secret, and it wasn’t liable to change anything, but it made for a small breach of faith.

The PRT officer finished off the search by combing my hair with a metal comb that I suspected was sharpened at the points to double as a wood saw. It felt like it, at least. The combing wasn’t done to look tidy, but to search my hair for any foreign matter or tools. I was just glad they hadn’t decided to shave it all off. I wouldn’t have put it past them.

“Towel is in the bag,” the PRT officer said. She shook a plastic bag to open it, then began putting my clothes inside, leaving me only the underwear.

I opened the drawstring bag, which was missing a drawstring, then sorted out the contents. A thin towel, a single sheet so thin it was translucent, a pillow and pillowcase that looked to be the same fabric as the mattress, folded double, half the size of a normal pillow. There were prison sweats, black, with the word ‘Villain’ printed across the shoulders and down the right leg in white, with a white t-shirt with the same word in black. There was a small kit with a rubbery, flexible thimble-toothbrush that fit over one finger and a small tube of toothpaste, three tampons with soap, three cardboard applicators, and three pads.

Not that it mattered. I’d been under enough stress the past few months that I’d missed my periods entirely. I might have panicked, if the timing of it had been different. I was safe. Ninety-nine point nine percent sure I was safe.

She waited until I had quickly toweled dry, put the underwear and prison sweats on, then handed me my glasses and opened the door. I caught a glimpse of Triumph and Clockblocker before she blocked my line of sight.

“Sit tight, princess,” she said.

The door whisked shut, leaving me confined in a space so narrow that I could lay down and touch two opposing walls with toe and outstretched hand. Only the ceiling was out of reach.

I adjusted the sweats, leaving the front open, headed to the bed, laid down the pillow and stretched out.

“…Alcott girl,” Tagg was saying. “Is she here?”

“On her way,” the deputy director answered.

“Then I think it’s time to settle on a game plan,” the Director said. “I’m Skitter’s target, or one of them. …ssination?”

“Coercion,” Miss Militia said.

“I see. Her power extends to the remainder of this building, even now, am I right?”

“Arthropodokinesis, arthropodovoyance,” the Deputy Director said. “She’s on record as a master eight, thinker one. The thinker classification is key here: ex-Director Piggot noted Skitter can see through her bugs’ eyes.”

“Can she lipread?” Tagg asked.

“No idea,” the Deputy Director replied.

“I said it before,” Miss Militia said. Her voice was a fraction quieter than before, but I couldn’t read her tone with the bugs’ hearing. “She’s resourceful. I’d assume she took the time to learn, if it would expand her capabilities.”

Director Tagg nodded slowly, then rubbed his chin again. The movement of his wrist against his armrest nearly killed the bug I had in between his dress shirt and jacket. “Agreed. I already informed each of my officers to treat her as though she had a two point classification in every category, or two points higher in cases where she’s already received scores. Brute two, mover two… all the way down the list. It won’t do to underestimate her. Let’s anticipate that she’s put herself in this position to have full access to the building by way of her power. Until further notice, staff aren’t to access any confidential files, we don’t speak on any private matters while within her reach, capes are to remain masked at all times while on the premises, and we’ll devote all remaining resources to preparing for any conflict.”

Clockblocker and Triumph had entered just as he finished speaking.

“Conflict?” Clockblocker asked. He took a chair among the other Wards.

“It remains a possibility. If her teammates were to attack, she’d be positioned to use her power to hamper us, up until we used the nonlethal measures to incapacitate her,” Tagg replied.

“I could use my power,” Clockblocker said. “Put her on pause, repeat the process until we have other measures in place.”

“No,” Tagg said. “We need you elsewhere, and each contact gives her a chance to act against you or escape. She’s confined, and we can use countermeasures to incapacitate her if need be.”

The Director set his elbows on the table and leaned over, covering his mouth with his hands. I missed some of what he said, as his words were muffled. “And … her stew for a while.”

Ah. So the psychological pressure extended another step. A strip search, a claustrophobic cell, stripping away my possessions, and now he planned to keep me cooped up in here until my composure cracked. Not so effective if I was being put on pause, with only a fraction of the time passing.

“The alternative,” Assault said, “Is that this is exactly what she wants. She wants us to react.”

“It’s possible,” Tagg said. “Getting us agitated, getting media attention, having us call in assistance, only to humiliate us further.”

“You’re bringing in help?” Miss Militia asked.

“We’ll see,” Tagg said. He touched his face as he spoke, and it muddled his words, “In the …, see to the … I recommended in dealing with her. It would be best if you didn’t use your computer, with her … watching-”

“If she’s … fight a war over the city’s heart, let’s make the first move. We contact the media, control … … they have access to, make sure the first thing the public hears is our side. Make sure we make some mention of Accord, and Hellhound’s penchant for chewing up people who trespass on her territory.”

“I’ll see to it,” the deputy director said.

Odd, to be so utterly helpless while I watched my enemies maneuver against me. I couldn’t, wouldn’t use my power here. I couldn’t talk to them, or request anything.

I shifted position, and the metal bands squeaked. I couldn’t find a position to lie down, and wound up sitting. I toweled my hair ineffectually in an attempt to get it dry.

An officer, out of uniform, appeared at the door to the conference room. “Media already has the story. Vickery, with channel twelve. He’s asking us for final comments before the story goes live.”

“Is he on the phone right now?”

“Yes sir.”

Tagg stood, “Tell him I’ll talk to him when I’m done here, and I’ll make any wait worth his while.”

“Yes sir.”

As the uniform left, Tagg remained standing at the end of the table. “Anticipate confrontation, but don’t seek it out. Whatever they have planned, they’ll want to rescue her.”

“We can seal off the stairwell access with containment foam,” Kid Win spoke up. “Seize the elevator, to prevent access to the cells. If there’s an attack, we shut down the elevator. In the worst case scenario, they can’t get her out before reinforcements arrived from other cities.”

“You can do it fast?” Tagg asked.

“Very,” Kid Win said.

“See to it. Where do things stand with the defense system against the bugs?”

“Not done, but I could wrap it up soonish with Sere’s help, maybe.”

“Sere? You’ll cooperate?”

“Yes,” Sere replied. “Of course.”

“Then it’s settled. Everyone else, double the number of patrols, form pairs at a bare minimum, focus on recon more than fighting. Track the Undersiders, meet with contacts. Consider this a mid-to-high priority situation, keep that in mind if you’ve any favors to call in and you’re weighing whether you should. Miss Militia? Ready the measures we discussed, and use the Wards. We don’t want them in a direct confrontation, and they can fend for themselves if ambushed.”

“Yes sir.”

With that, the meeting was broken up. Tagg headed to his office, the Wards moved to the elevator to head down to their headquarters, below the cell that held me, and the Protectorate headed out on patrols.

My power’s range was about five blocks. It should have been larger, going by the running theory that feeling ‘trapped’ extended my reach, but I was in here by my own device. I couldn’t necessarily force it.

Five blocks felt oppressively small, in the grand scheme of things. I was in a six-foot by six-foot cell with thick walls, nothing to read, no television to watch, and only dull metal and chrome to look at. The vague blur of my reflection in the walls was only a dark shadow, the occasional gleam of light of my glasses.

Around me, the PRT office buzzed like an anthill I’d kicked. People were heading here and there on tasks and missions, reacting, preparing, anticipating some form of attack. The higher-ranking members of the PRT made calls to contacts, prepared, and set security measures in place. PRT uniforms got geared up, off-duty teams were called in and prepared, organized in defensive lines around the building.

Miss Militia, for her part, sent Flechette on an errand, instructing her to make a phone call and return as soon as possible, and then started organizing the Wards.

I set bugs on the minute and hour hands of a clock. It was both a curse and a blessing, because it made me acutely aware of how slowly time was passing.

“Things are going crazy,” Crucible said.

“This is big,” Clockblocker said.

“I’m just saying, you’d think things get calmer when the kingpin- queenpin-“

“Crime lord,” Clockblocker said, “It’s easier.”

“When the crime lord of the city turns themselves in.”

Vista spun around in her chair to face Crucible, “She’s probably planning something like getting put in jail, then breaking out and showing us there’s no point in trying to catch her, because we can’t keep her. And she’ll do it with teeny-weeny bugs, make Tagg look bad, maybe get him fired.”

“Fits,” Clockblocker mused.

“But she can’t know she’ll escape. What if we did have Dragon and Defiant move her halfway across the country?”

“She used my power to cut Echidna in half,” Clockblocker said. “She could deal with that, too.”

“Again with the Echidna thing,” Crucible said. “Can’t you tell-”

“Classified,” Clockblocker, Kid Win and Vista said, at the same time. Kid Win didn’t even look up from the containment foam dispenser he was tinkering with.

“Fuck you guys.”

The screen in my cell flashed yellow, then beeped once, a sound loud enough that it made me jump.

I stood from the bed and walked around until I faced the screen.

It stayed yellow for long seconds, then went dark.

Checking on me?

I sat back down.

The minutes were ticking away. Tagg was counting on this confinement wearing on me. Putting me in a different headspace for when he finally decided to come down and grill me. It… was working, but probably not to the degree he was thinking. Being manhandled by the PRT officer had been another attempt at getting me outside of my comfort zone, no doubt a gambit, where any resistance from me would be met by a shout from Triumph, a beating and a use of Clockblocker’s power before the door was shut in my face. A lack of resistance only making me uncomfortable, putting me in my place, for lack of a better phrase.

But again, it didn’t matter. My concerns were on bigger things, on the space beyond this cell, on everything I needed to achieve.

A family made their way to the lobby. I assumed them to be tourists, until the guards let them into the building. Two adults and a young girl. The Alcotts.

Dinah had cut her hair short.

Reinventing herself? Distancing herself from being Coil’s ‘pet’?

Tagg met them at the end of the lobby, then ushered them upstairs to the conference room. They were joined by Mrs. Yamada, her cousin Triumph, and Miss Militia.

Tagg waited until everyone else was seated before sitting at the head of the table.

He pressed a key, and the monitor in my room beeped. I lay down on the bed before the six seconds were up and the cameras went on.

When he was done looking in on me, he closed the laptop.

“She turned herself in,” Dinah said.

“Your power pick up on that?” Triumph asked.

“We watched the news,” Dinah’s mom said.

“When you said sending Defiant and Dragon into the school would virtually guarantee that Skitter was brought into custody,” Tagg said, and his phrasing was odd, as if he were choosing words carefully or there was a tone my bugs’ hearing wasn’t picking up on, “you didn’t say anything about this.”

I did catch the emphasis on ‘this’ as he finished.

“This?” Dinah’s father asked.

“That she’d surrender, nearly a week later. The timing of it, the fact that it could be a ploy.”

“I didn’t know,” Dinah said.

“If you have an accusation,” Mr. Alcott said, “Say it outright.”

“I’m saying your daughter was helping Skitter, not us. That everything seems to suggest she was aiding and abetting a known criminal.”

“I don’t necessarily agree with the Director’s line of reasoning, Dinah,” Miss Militia said, “But Skitter’s a known criminal mastermind, with an emphasis on the latter. She’s a capable strategist and a battlefield tactician. As far as we were aware, she was well situated as one of the more powerful villains in North America, judging by her control over this city. In the past week alone, she’s … two villainous organizations and folded a third into her own. There’s no reason for her to surrender. The only way any of this makes sense is if there’s a greater plan at work.”

“And you think Dinah had something to do with that plan?” Mrs. Alcott asked.

Mrs. Yamada leaned forward, “It’s very understandable if Dinah feels indebted or attached to Skitter, to Taylor Hebert. She owes her a great deal.”

Dinah mumbled something. I wasn’t sure if it was even a word.

Mrs. Yamada continued, “We’re only trying to make sense of this. Wanting to help someone who’s done a great deal for you isn’t a bad thing, Dinah, understand? But there’s other things going on. Sensitive things. Skitter may unwittingly do a lot of damage or put herself at risk, if she says the wrong things and the wrong people hear.”

“…,” Dinah said something under her breath.

“Beg pardon?” Mrs. Yamada asked.

“Good. If she does a lot of damage, then good.”

Director Tagg started to speak, but Mrs. Yamada cut him off. “Why is that good, Dinah?”

“Can’t say. Won’t say.”

“You are working with her, then,” Tagg said. He shifted position in his chair.

“No. Yes. Both. I’m working for everyone. I don’t think Skitter’s very happy with me, really. But she’s still here, because I told her to be.”

“You’ve been in communication with her?” Miss Militia asked. I could tell how much gentler her voice was than Tagg’s.

“No.”

“Oh my lord,” Tagg said, leaning back in his chair and staring up at the ceiling. “I think I’m about to have an aneurysm.”

Dinah didn’t reply.

“Do you hate the PRT, Dinah?” Miss Militia asked.

“No.”

“Or heroes? Do you blame us for not helping you when you needed it?”

“No. A little, but that’s not important.”

“But you want Skitter to do damage? To hurt us?”

“She’ll do damage, one way or another. If she didn’t come here voluntarily, she probably would have become meaner. It would have turned into a big fight, and she would make a mistake eventually and get brought in. But she decided to surrender, so the same thing happens. I’m glad that happened.”

“All because we revealed her identity,” Yamada said.

“Yes.”

“But we don’t know the ramifications of this ploy of hers,” Miss Militia said.

“I do,” Dinah replied. “But I’m not telling. And I’m charging ten times as much if you ask me for a number, and then I’ll lie, and I won’t be able to use my power for a while after. And your bosses don’t want that. Not with an Endbringer coming soon.”

“You’ll charge us for a number you won’t provide?” Tagg asked.

“Yes. Because I charge you for asking. I can’t help but look for the numbers, so I have to look. And that makes my head hurt if I do it too much.”

Tagg let his hand drop to the table with enough force to make a noise and make the lid of the laptop in front of him clatter.

“Why, Dinah?” Miss Militia asked. “Why do this?”

“For everyone. Because we got this far, it makes the numbers a little better. Whatever happens from here on out, it makes the end of the world a little less bad.”

“A little less bad,” Triumph echoed her.

“But it still happens,” Tagg said.

“Almost always. The world ends, in two years or in fifteen or sixteen.”

Tagg opened his laptop, “Do you have anything to say to Skitter?”

“No,” Dinah said. “I’m done.”

“Done.”

“Yes. I’m busy. It’s only because my cousin works here that I even came.”

“You seem to be playing a dangerous game,” Tagg said, “Testing our goodwill, manipulating us for your own ends.”

“Everyone’s ends, and I didn’t manipulate you. You asked for a number, I gave it.”

He ignored her. “Helping her when you should be helping us.”

“I don’t have to help you,” she said. “I’m not a good guy. I’m not a bad guy. I’m done working for other people, answering their questions when I don’t want to. I work for me, and for everyone.”

Odd, to think how much time I’d dedicated to Dinah, and how little I really knew her. There was this, only now, and the discussions we had prior to me taking her home. So little.

Tagg was rubbing his temples. “Fine. Now, when you said that the outcome of this improves the numbers, I understand that includes sending her to the Birdcage?”

“When I said I was done, I meant it,” Dinah said. She pushed her chair back. Her parents joined her, standing. “You want more answers, get in contact with my dad, he’ll let you know my rates. They change every day.”

“Not a wise business decision for a rogue starting out,” Tagg said, without rising from his chair. “Offending an organization like the PRT, a young lady like you mouthing off. We could cooperate, instead.”

He was threatening her? I clenched a fist.

Dinah looked back at him. “I don’t think you have any conception how valuable my answers are. I could answer one question a week for people in Asia and I’d be set for life. I don’t care if I offend you.”

“I don’t know,” the Director said. “You said she’ll do damage in some form. Maybe we need to stop that from happening. And you said that no matter what happens, the outcome’s more in our favor than it was before she surrendered. Why? Is it that important to remove her from Brockton Bay? To unseat her from her throne?”

“I’m not answering any more questions.”

“You’ll answer what I ask you to answer,” Tagg said, “Because we need to go into this with our eyes open. We can’t have Skitter damage us.”

“The last thing I want is another arrogant dickface telling me what to do,” Dinah said. “You want answers, Director? Fine. Twenty two point eight one three percent chance you die painfully, over long, slow minutes or hours. Maybe soon, maybe in twenty years, but it’ll bring you to tears, and you’ll wail in pain. That’s a freebie. Want more details?”

“Guys,” Miss Militia said.

“You assume I care about that,” the Director said.

“You will.”

“Guys,” Miss Militia said, louder.

“If you refuse to give us assistance, and people get hurt, then that’s on your head,” Director Tagg said.

“I deal with that every day,” Dinah said. “I’ll cope.”

“Guys!” Miss Militia stood from her chair, the feet screeching against the ground. She raised her voice another notch. “Look.”

She pointed at the window.

I moved my bugs to check for whatever it was she was pointing at, then stopped.

She was pointing at the bugs. They’d reacted to my irritation, and were swirling just beyond the window of the conference room, clustering on the glass surface.

“Watching what? There’s nothing to look at,” Miss Militia said. “Think about it. What this is to her.”

“She hears,” Mrs. Yamada finished the thought.

I shut my eyes, swore under my breath. I’d let my guard down. I’d been too focused on what was going on inside the building, letting bugs cluster on the outside, that I’d given my reactions away. So much for gathering intel.

Tagg faced the window, no doubt staring at it, at the bugs.

“Arthropodaudience,” Miss Militia said. “She’s fully aware of everything that’s been going on in this building.”

“I’m gone,” Dinah said. “I can’t communicate with her or the numbers change. I’ll be letting the PRT know you pissed me off. They can expect prices to go up five percent from here on out.”

With that, Dinah was gone, saying something to her parents that I couldn’t make out.

My focus was more on Tagg.

“So,” he said, his voice low, “You can hear me.”

“Yes,” my bugs replied, speaking throughout the building. They were distributed evenly enough that it would barely be audible. A thin, almost imperceptible sound. More than a few people jumped in reaction to it.

“I see,” the Director said. “You tipped your hand.”

I didn’t have a response to that. I had.

He turned to Miss Militia. “See that Kid Win gets the defense system online sooner than later. I’d like this building cleared of bugs.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“And you,” the Director said. I was getting used to his voice. I caught the emphasis there. “You stay put and be good.”

I shifted position, sitting on the end of the bed, elbows on my knees, staring at the floor.

Waiting, listening, watching.

Another twenty minutes, forty minutes, sixty minutes passing, with irregular check-ins by way of the monitor. Every member of the PRT was set in place, some near the PRT headquarters, others elsewhere in the city. Heroes went on patrol and came back, making short trips, no longer than half an hour each. Each hero in a pairing took turns reporting to Tagg.

Rachel had been seen crossing the city earlier, as had Grue. A meeting at the Forsberg Gallery. If they were following Tagg’s orders, there was now a PRT wagon stationed nearby, ready with a containment foam turret, in case the villains decided to meet there again.

Miss Militia got a list of phone calls to make from Tagg, then left, exiting my range.

Another half hour. Another check-in, a group of four heroes teleported in, Miss Militia returned and whispered back and forth with Tagg. There was a long discussion between the new heroes, Assault, Miss Militia and Tagg about how concentrated the forces were, now. Too many PRT uniforms and heroes in one place, the danger if they were all wiped out.

In a matter of minutes, they’d organized another distribution. Expanding control over the area, keeping two major groups out of my reach.

Only five minutes after the groups had departed, Kid Win activated his system. Floating drones started to roam the PRT headquarters, each no larger than a toaster, each with multiple settings that they rotated between. They emulated Sere’s power on a low enough level to kill bugs in the area without doing undue harm to any people, then became laser turrets, firing an invisible beam every second for about a minute, killing a bug with each shot. Then they shifted focus and accelerated, veering to a different location with unpredictable trajectories.

Kid Win was making more, too. He was joined by one of the heroes that had just arrived. Another tinker. I caught a snippet of what they were talking about before the next drone kicked to life and killed the bugs I had on the new arrival. Workshop talk. Improving designs.

Damn tinkers.

Avoiding the drones became something of a game, occupying my attention to the point that I was still able to keep tabs on a few important people, but I was badly limited in terms of my ability to listen in. Fifteen minutes passed without me seeing or hearing anything significant. The monitor flared yellow for another check-in. Two minutes later, there was another. Irregular, unpredictable.

As a plus, Tagg seemed to be getting restless, if the movements of his blurry form within his office were any indication. He’d arranged his forces, and the only thing he could do now was wait.

We were both waiting. Both biding our time in the hopes that the other would crack first, make the first move and initiate conversation.

Miss Militia left to make another batch of calls outside my range. She returned sooner than before, made a beeline straight for Tagg, and exchanged a few more whispered words.

Together, they made their way to the elevator. The Protectorate tinker that had just arrived was sealing off the staircase, and there was only one way down.

As a pair, Miss Militia and Tagg walked down the length of the hallway, stopping outside of my cell. I combed my hair out of my face, squared my shoulders and faced the door.

The screen turned red. A matter of seconds later, the doors slid open.

“Flechette?” Miss Militia asked.

Flechette? Had my allies done something?

“Did you plan this?” Miss Militia asked.

I elected not to answer. This was a small victory, no matter what they were referring to. Tagg had broken first, had come to me more on my terms than his. I was going to play it for everything it was worth.

I met Tagg’s glare with a level stare of my own.

“If you used Regent to make this happen-” Miss Militia said.

Regent?

“Not Regent,” I said. I hope it’s not Regent.

“You’re admitting you planned her defection, then?”

Defection? I thought of Parian.

“I… left the door open for it to happen,” I said. True, though not nearly to the extent I was implying.

“And this plays a role in your greater plan?” Miss Militia asked. She was doing all the talking, here. It seemed Tagg didn’t want to break the silence.

I thought for a second. “Consider it symbolic.”

“Of?”

I smiled a little, then shrugged.

That seemed to be the point where Tagg lost his cool. He didn’t get angry. Instead, he merely said, “Interrogation room B.”

Miss Militia held a pair of ordinary handcuffs in one hand, a taser in the other. I turned and extended my hands behind me, and she set the handcuffs in place, holding my arm as she led me down the length of the hall, around the corner and into a large room with only a table, a chair, and more sheet metal covering everything.

“One o’clock,” I said, when I’d taken my seat. Miss Militia was unclipping my cuffs, moving my hands around in front of me to slip them through the reinforced table.

“I think it’s about one,” Miss Militia said.

“Exactly one,” I said.

“Is the time important?” she stepped away from the table.

“Her friends will move to attack at a set time,” Tagg said. “She won’t share that time, because she wants us to squirm, to be on high alert.”

“Eight thirty,” I said. “Sunset.”

I could see his heavy eyebrows rise in mild surprise.

“You planned something for eight-thirty?”

“No,” I said. I smiled a little, looking down at the table. “I didn’t plan anything. I didn’t say goodbye. I walked away, and I turned myself in.”

“You’re acting like that’s something special,” Tagg said, leaning against the wall by the door, his arms folded.

“The only instruction I gave was to Tattletale, to hold the others back until sunset, and to give them direction when they do act. They’ll have time to get angry in the meantime. They’ll be mad at me, but they’ll take it out on you. You have to understand, even at my worst, even when I’m as mad as I was the other night, when you’d outed me, I was sensible, reasonable in terms of how I dealt with you and held back. Now you get to see how unreasonable the rest of the Undersiders can be, without me to rein them in.”

“I thought this might be it. A lesson in the role you play here. Leading us to think that we need you,” Tagg said, “To keep them in line.”

“That’s not it,” I said.

“No?”

“It’s not even secondary, in terms of what I’m looking to achieve. I don’t think I could go back to them and return to my position if I wanted to. And I don’t.”

“Then what?” he asked.

“It’s a time limit. You saw what we were willing to do to Butcher, to Valefor. Even with that, even there, we were holding back as a group. Trust me when I say that I know my friends. If you stand between them and me? If you hurt me? They’re going to go thermonuclear on you. On the PRT as a whole. Tattletale will make sure of it. She’ll keep them on target, guide them, and maximize the damage. She’ll do most of the damage.”

“You said you weren’t going to do any harm to the PRT,” Miss Militia said.

“If things go that way,” I said, “It’s because the PRT is hurting the PRT. Which wouldn’t be an isolated incident.”

“Cute,” Tagg said.

I met his eyes. “I’m just saying. It’s really up to you guys. Send me to the Birdcage, you lose everything. Things get ugly for the PRT at a critical point in time. I suffer, the Undersiders suffer, you suffer, the world suffers.”

I stopped, watching him for any sign of doubt, for a waver in his eyes, for a change in his expression or posture. His poker face was good.

Miss Militia shifted position, but didn’t speak.

“Or?” Tagg finally asked.

“Or you let me call my lawyer, and then you hear my demands,” I said.

“Demands?” he growled the word.

“Demands. I have several conditions you guys will have to meet before I capitulate. I’ll bow my head, appear in public, plea bargain, do whatever you want. You get me, wholesale, no contest, and no complications. The PRT gets a victory at a point in time when, like I said, it’s most vulnerable.”

I studied his expression, then looked at Miss Militia.

“It’s your choice. You won’t like my demands. They call for big changes. But the alternative is an all-out war. I think Miss Militia will agree with me here, if the PRT doesn’t hear me out, it deserves what it gets.”

The appearance of the heroine in gleaming power armor had brought the room to a hush. The silence only allowed Dragon’s words to carry, bouncing off the hard floor, reaching the assembled students and staff of Arcadia High.

A low murmur ran through the room like an almost imperceptible aftershock, informing anyone and everyone who hadn’t been in earshot.

I could see Emma too, or I could see glimpses of her, between the students that were backing away from the front of the room. Already pale in complexion, she was white, now, staring.

I exhaled slowly, though my heart was pounding as if I’d just finished a hard run.

Defiant advanced a step, with the door to the kitchens behind him, while I took a few steps back toward the rest of the cafeteria, putting both Dragon and Defiant in front of me. Some of my bugs flowed in through the gaps around the door he’d rammed through. He’d slammed it shut behind him, but the metal had twisted around the lock, giving smaller bugs a path.

He slammed his spear against the ground. The entire cafeteria flinched at the crackle of electricity that ripped through the air around him, flowing along exposed pipe and the heating ducts in a path to the door. Every bug in the hallway died.

No use bringing bugs in that way.

I looked around me. This wasn’t an optimal battlefield. There were counters all around me, limiting my mobility, while barely impacting theirs. Someone had signaled Kid Win, Clockblocker and Adamant. The three heroes were heading our way. Sere remained tied up outside.

Five capes against me. With the bugs that had flowed into the building with Kid Win, I had maybe a thousand flying insects and some spiders. Not nearly enough to mount an offensive. I had neither a weapon nor swarm to give me an edge. I didn’t have my costume, either, but that wasn’t liable to matter.

Once upon a time, I’d had trouble getting my head around what Grue had been saying about reputation, about image and conveying the right impressions. Now it was all I had.

I let out another slow breath. Calm down. I rolled my shoulders, letting the kinks out. There was something almost relieving about the idea that things couldn’t get much worse than they were right now. Let the tension drain out. If they decided to drag me off to jail or the Birdcage, there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

They weren’t attacking. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Were they not here to arrest me, or were they covering major routes my bugs might travel, to minimize my offensive strength?

Or did I have leverage I wasn’t accounting for?

I backed up until I’d reached a counter, then hopped up onto the edge, tucking one leg under me. It was a vantage point that gave me the ability to look directly at Dragon, with Defiant at the far left of my field of vision and many of the students to my right, Emma included.

“Low blow, Dragon,” I said, finally. “Outing me? I thought you were better than that.”

Another murmur ran through the room, at what was essentially an admission. Emma was frozen. Her expression wasn’t changing; eyes wide, lips pressed together.

“I try to be,” Dragon replied. “I’m only following instructions.”

“I guess your bosses are a little annoyed at the armored suits my team trashed? Are they demanding that you make up for it by dragging me into custody?”

Dragon shook her head. “Putting the armored suits up against you Undersiders was a beta test, and identifying major flaws is par for the course. I do wish you hadn’t melted down the Azazel… It was expensive. But that’s not why we’re here.”

“There are rules, Dragon,” I said. “Expectations. I fought Leviathan, I fought the Nine. I was there for the fight against the Class-S threat downtown. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I think maybe I deserve to, a little. I’ve done my share. You don’t turn around and reveal my identity in front of a crowd.”

“It wasn’t by choice.”

“You choose to follow them. It’s not like twenty or thirty heroes haven’t walked away from the Protectorate, recently.”

“It’s not that simple, Skitter,” Defiant said.

“It’s never simple. But sometimes you have to take the hard road. Sometimes you have to recognize that the people calling the shots don’t know what they’re doing. Because this? Picking a fight in a school? There’s no way this makes sense.”

“The Protectorate is doing what they can to pick up the pieces,” Dragon said. “Things are a little disorganized. The best of us are working twice as hard, with half of the information, or incorrect information. If there are any errors in judgement on that front, I’d hope they’re somewhat excusable, given circumstances.”

“Sure, but it’s the rest of us who pay the price. The last time we really talked, you were lecturing me about priorities. Do you really want to have this conversation? Where I have words with you about your priorities, in light of everything that’s happening with the Protectorate?”

I left the threat hang in the air.

“You won’t,” Dragon said. She stepped closer, and I raised a hand, gesturing for her to stop. I didn’t really think about it. She stopped where she was.

Why? Why was she actually listening when I told her to stop? If she’d advanced on me, grabbed me, there wasn’t much I could do besides kick and scream.

When I didn’t say anything, she added, “It’s not in you, Skitter.”

“You’d be surprised what I’m capable of,” I said. “I’ve mutilated people. Carved out a man’s eyes, emasculated him. I’ve chopped off a woman’s toes. Flayed people alive with the bites of thousands of insects. Hell, what I did to Triumph… he nearly died, choking on insects, the venom of a hundred bee stings making his throat close up. Even Sere, outside at this very moment. He’s not very happy.”

Defiant and Dragon exchanged a glance.

“Your swarm shouldn’t be able to get near him,” Defiant said.

I shrugged. Image, confidence, reputation. I hated myself for doing it, but I was thinking of Jack Slash. He didn’t wear a mask or a costume. His power didn’t make people shit their pants. What he had was his presence, an atmosphere of confidence.

Weeks or months ago, I might have had a hard time wearing that confidence the way Jack did. The history, the long sequence of events and conflicts where we’d come out ahead in our respective teams, it could just as easily be a burden, the accumulated weight of the various precedents we’d set, but we’d made it into our armor, something to make our enemies hesitate at a critical juncture.

I didn’t have to give a response. Fear was a tool I could use, here, and I could achieve that through uncertainty and the unknown.

I’d been thinking of Jack Slash before, but now I was thinking of Bakuda. She’d been the first one to introduce me to that concept.

“You’ve got me thinking,” I said, ignoring the question, “Why set me up like this? You two are too smart to put me in a desperate situation with this many hostages in arm’s reach.”

“Is Sere hurt?” Defiant growled the words.

“You put me in a room with three hundred people I could theoretically take hostage. Why? You can’t be that confident I wouldn’t hurt someone…”

Emma was sitting to my right. She hadn’t budged from her position, safe in the midst of several of the school’s staff. I directed a centipede to crawl across her hand, and she shrieked. In her haste to get up from the bench, she fell. She scrambled to put distance between us. Both Dragon and Defiant tensed.

I raised my hands in a placating gesture, assuring the heroes I wasn’t taking it any further. “…or you wouldn’t be worrying about Sere right now. You wouldn’t have reacted like you just did. Sere’s fine, by the way, though I’m not saying he’ll stay that way.”

Defiant relaxed a fraction. I could see Adamant, Kid Win and Clockblocker entering the room behind Dragon. She turned to say something I didn’t catch, and both Adamant and Kid Win retreated. They’d be going to find Sere, I could only assume.

I met Clockblocker’s eyes, then looked to Dragon. “This is bait, isn’t it? You or the people who are calling the shots want me to take hostages. Because you have an answer handy, something that will stop me before they’re put in any serious danger. I take hostages to try to secure my release. You… I don’t even know. You gas us, or use some kind of controlled charge, like Defiant’s bug zapper, and every bug in the room dies. You get to be the heroes, I go into custody, and word gets around that the Undersiders aren’t so benevolent. The villains who own the city lose both their leader and the trust of the public, all at once.”

“It wasn’t our plan,” Dragon said. Her voice had a faint accent, just barely filtering through the sound filter of her mask. “I’ve studied your record. I suspected it wouldn’t work based on the decisions you’ve made to date. Defiant agreed, though he based his judgement on your powers and versatility.”

“But you went ahead with it.”

“Orders,” Dragon said, again. “And because we discussed the matter, and neither of us really believe you’ll do any serious harm to any hostages.”

“You seem to be giving me a lot of credit, assuming I’ll play nice. And you seriously expect me to keep my mouth shut about all the dirty little secrets I’ve picked up on over the last few months, after you’ve played your last card and revealed my identity? An identity you found out because I helped?”

“That wasn’t how I discovered it,” Dragon said. “And you will keep quiet, because you know how important it is.”

“Maybe,” I answered her. “Maybe not. If I’m going to die or going to jail anyways, why shouldn’t I scream what I know to our audience, here?”

“Because you won’t,” Dragon said, “And you can’t.”

“Why don’t we move this conversation somewhere else?” Defiant asked. He shifted his hold on his spear to a two-handed grip, threatening without being threatening.

“Out of earshot of all of these people?” I asked, extending an arm in the direction of the gathered students. “I don’t think so. If nothing else, I’m entitled to a jury consisting of my peers. I’ll settle for you two taking a hit to your reputation if and when you attack or kill me.”

Which was why I was sitting on the counter. I was less mobile, less able to get out of the way if they attacked, and that was a good thing. A detail that our audience wouldn’t consciously register, but they’d take something away from the fact that my opponents were being aggressive while I was so defenseless.

“We’re not going to kill you,” Dragon said. “We’ve been instructed to take you into custody. I’m sorry we have to do it this way. I’d hoped… we’d hoped to simply talk to you.”

“The both of you? I wouldn’t have thought Arm- Defiant had anything to say to me.”

“We entered Brockton Bay’s airspace, and I was informed that there’s a major quarantine in effect here, relating to the portal downtown, and that the airspace is being strictly controlled. We were forced to announce our reason for coming to Brockton Bay, and PRT members with higher clearance co-opted our mission. We were ordered to confront you directly, here, and to bring you into custody.”

“Why?” I asked. “Those suits you deployed against my team were supposed to be used to hunt the Slaughterhouse Nine. Either you’ve abandoned that chase, or you’re about to tell me that there’s something more important than stopping them.”

“That is something we can discuss while we are in transit,” Defiant told me.

“Defiant-” Dragon said, her tone a warning.

“I could say more here,” he added, “But there are too many prying ears. If you were willing to move to a room nearby, I could explain.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“You’d still have your power, and I know you can communicate with that power,” Defiant said. “You’re just as capable of communicating any secrets to them from elsewhere in the school.”

“If I moved somewhere out of sight and out of earshot,” I said, “My words wouldn’t have the same dramatic effect. Besides, I suspect our audience is the only thing that’s ensuring that you play fair. They have cameras, and you have reputations to uphold.”

“My reputation isn’t a priority,” he said. Dragon nodded, but I wasn’t sure if it was approval or agreement.

“You have your organization’s reputation to uphold. For those of us who stuck around in Brockton Bay, we had reasons. Something kept us here. There was something to protect, or people to support. Some were just scared, because actually leaving was scarier than staying. Others didn’t have any place to go. With the Protectorate slowly folding in on itself like a house of cards, I’m thinking you had a reason to stay, a reason you’re following orders you don’t want to. You’re not about to rough up an unarmed, uncostumed girl and make them look bad on camera. Not when you have that big a stake in things.”

Defiant glanced in the direction of the crowd. A handful of students had cell phones out, watching the scene.

“Remind you of the hospital?” I asked. “Similar scenario.”

“Yes,” he replied. He didn’t elaborate.

“We could grab you,” Clockblocker chimed in. “I can, or he can just walk up to you. No violence necessary.”

“No,” Defiant said. Again, there was no elaboration.

It dawned on me. Defiant and Dragon were playing it safe because they thought I might have a trick up my sleeve, like I had at the fundraiser. I’d disabled Sere, despite the fact that he was supposed to counter my power, and I hadn’t even made a big deal of it. They knew what I’d done to Echidna, and several other events besides.

They were worried I’d pull something.

Defiant had a grasp on my powers, Dragon had a grasp on me as a person, and they’d gauged that I wasn’t a risk to the others in the room. Which, if I was being honest with myself, I wasn’t. They had the upper hand, they lost nothing by letting this play out, and so they weren’t making a move. They’d talk me down, so to speak, and if I did something, they’d use one of their gadgets or tricks to counter my play.

One of the worst possible things had just happened to me, with my secret identity becoming public knowledge, and here I was, unarmed without a single idea on how to get out of this… and the good guys were playing it safe. I smiled; I couldn’t help it.

“Fuck me,” Clockblocker muttered to Dragon. I might not have made out his words if it weren’t for the bugs I’d planted on the heroine. “It just sunk in. It’s really her.”

Why only just now?

Adamant had distorted his metal armor to create a completely form-fitting metal suit, with only the thinnest possible slits for his eyes, before venturing outside. He’d waded through my swarm, mostly blind, and he’d only just found Sere beyond the wall at the school’s perimeter. He reshaped an armor panel into a weapon to start cutting Sere free.

Could I have caught Adamant too? Probably. But it wasn’t worth the effort, not when he could reshape metal, with enhanced strength and durability on top of that.

Now that I understood what was going on, I felt like I had something of an edge. Now, how could I leverage it?

“I’m sorry,” Defiant said.

That threw my thoughts off track. I tensed, but he wasn’t apologizing for an imminent attack. “What?”

“In the past, when we’ve crossed paths, I should have made efforts to meet you halfway. I didn’t. I’ve had time to reflect, I’ve had another person to talk to and give me some objectivity, and I’ve come to regret how things played out between us. I could say more, but it would come out like excuses, and I doubt either of us want to hear those.”

“That’s what you came here to say?”

“In large part,” Defiant said.

“We’d hoped to talk to you, one cape to another,” Dragon elaborated, “About the immediate future, with the Undersiders running this city, and your expectations in particular, Skitter. But both Defiant and I thought he needed to say something to you along those lines, and perhaps you needed to hear it. If anything pushed us to come here, it was that.”

I didn’t have a response to that. It was easier when the opposition were assholes. Expressing remorse? How was I supposed to parse that?

Except, they’d done one thing that was assholish. One incongruent element in all of this.

“One last question, then,” I said. “Why? Why out me in front of everyone? It doesn’t fit with the idea of Defiant being remorseful, it flies in the face of the unwritten rules, and I know my team has played fast and loose with those rules, but I wouldn’t expect you to break them like this, Dragon. Not Defiant, either, if he’s reinventing himself.”

Defiant and Dragon exchanged a look.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s better you don’t know,” Dragon said.

“What is? And better for who?”

“Better for everyone involved,” she said.

“Tell me.”

She glanced at Defiant, but he didn’t turn her way. “A precog told us it was our best option for bringing you into custody.”

A precog? The incongruous elements fit together. A plan of action that was riddled with little flaws and contradictions when seen from an outside perspective, that made sense when seen through the lens of someone who’d seen the future and worked out what criteria needed to be met to get the desired end result. This, mobilizing on the school, it was the same kind of setup I might expect from a plan that Coil would have hashed together after a long question and answer session with Dinah, his ‘pet’ precog.

Dinah.

“Who was this precog?” I asked, the question abrupt.

“Skitter-” Dragon started.

“Who?”

“You know who,” Defiant told me.

It knocked the wind out of me in a way that I hadn’t experienced with the revealing of my secret identity. My blood ran cold, and all of my confidence just plummeted, as though it had fallen into a pit so deep I couldn’t even see the bottom.

It was. All of the lengths I’d gone to, the lines I’d crossed, to get Dinah away from Coil, to get her home to her family, and… this?

I was acutely aware of the crowd to my right. They’d backed away from the front tables, and were clustered at the far end of the cafeteria. Still, they’d be hanging on every word they could make out. They were watching my every movement, every facet of this conversation. There were cell phone cameras turned my way, and every second of footage would no doubt wind up on Parahumans Online or some video site.

I barely cared. I felt a little numb as I swung my legs around to the far side of the counter and hopped down. I wasn’t standing as straight, and some of my hair had fallen down around my face, obscuring it.

“Did they force her to give up the information?” I asked. My voice sounded funny. I couldn’t pin down whether I felt angry, sad or any of that. I had only the external clues, the way my voice had the faintest of tremors, and a strange hollow feeling inside.

I stepped away from the counter, away from Dragon and Defiant. My foot had started to fall asleep where I’d been sitting on it, and I felt a touch unsteady anyways.

Dragon and Defiant had flown in, apparently to say hi, and so that Defiant could make something resembling an apology as part of his twelve step assholes anonymous process. With the chaos the PRT had been facing as of late, and their own preoccupation with their mission, they hadn’t been notified of the quarantine procedures. They’d been questioned, they’d divulged that I was here, and the bigwigs giving the orders used Dinah to plot out a means of attack that would be likely to get me into custody.

Each idea seemed so much worse than the other, if I considered it for even a moment: either the PRT was using Dinah just like Coil had, or that Dinah had volunteered the information of her own free will.

I was willing to take Defiant at his word. I didn’t want to hear the answer.

“What are the odds?” I asked. “Do you know?”

“I can ask,” Dragon said.

“Please.”

She paused. “Ninety-six point eight percent chance we bring you into custody,” Dragon said. “We have the numbers on general paths you might take to escape. You understand if I don’t give you the chance of success on those numbers, but you should know that violence won’t work. Less than one percent chance of success.”

“Ah.” It was all I could bring myself to say.

It explains why they’re playing it safe. It’s not just that I have a penchant for problem solving. Dinah told them to watch out for it.

I glanced at the crowd. They were still listening. Emma was there, hugging her arms to her body, eyes wide and uncomprehending.

Not even a factor. On the list of things I had to deal with, she wasn’t even in the top ten, not even in the top one-hundred. I felt irrationally offended that she was here, as if she was only doing it out of some kind of self-importance. As if she’d had a choice.

A part of me, bigger than I’d expected it to be, wanted to lash out. To hurt her just because I could, to answer that outrage I was experiencing, in regards to something she had no control over.

It wasn’t like I had much to lose.

“Skitter,” Dragon said. She made it a warning, almost like she had with Defiant. I couldn’t be sure what she was warning me about. Was my line of thinking that obvious?

“I never liked that name,” I said. “Skitter. Never quite fit.”

“If there’s something else you’d like us to call you…” she trailed off, inviting an answer. Her voice was gentle, as if she were talking to someone on a ledge. I noticed Clockblocker was standing beside her, his glove pointed at me, fingers outstretched.

Was I on a ledge, in a matter of speaking? I could hardly tell.

“No idea,” I said, as I walked around a table to put students between myself and Clockblocker. “Felt like commenting on the subject.”

“You know how capable the precog is,” Defiant said. “Come quietly, and we can all talk to the authorities together. If it would help, I can admit some culpability in your current circumstance. All of us together might be able to get you a more lenient sentence.”

I was aware of the eyes of the other students. There was the cluster at the back of the room, the ones who were backing away from me, cringing, cowering. Others hadn’t left their seats, and were arrayed around me, their heads turning to watch me as I walked down the aisle. The ones who’d stayed, less afraid, or more willing to face their fear.

He was admitting it, loud enough for everyone to hear. He was partially to blame for me being… this. A crime lord. A villain. Partially. Much of the fault was mine.

Strange, to be confronted with the realization here, at school. Not the place where it all started, but close enough.

“Okay,” I said, more to myself than anyone else.

“Yes?” he asked, taking a step forward.

“No,” I told him. He stopped in his tracks. “That was more of an okay, I’ve decided what I’m doing.”

I could see him tense.

“Students!” I called out, raising my voice.

“She’s taking hostages,” Dragon said, her jetpack kicking to life.

“…a clear shot,” Clockblocker said. He was walking briskly to his left, his glove still trained on me.

“I’m not taking you hostage,” I said. “It’s really your choice how this plays out. I’m not sure if you heard me say it before, but I described you as a jury. Now it’s time for you to vote.”

“That’s not how it works, Skitter!” Defiant shouted. He stepped forward, then whipped around to kill the swarm that was flowing in through the doorway behind him. I could divert some to the air ducts, but it didn’t amount to much. He was stuck near the door, unless he wanted to let the bugs stream in.

“Stand if you side with me,” I called out. “I won’t make any big speeches here. That’s not who I am. I won’t feed you lies or guilt you into this. It’s your call.”

What had I expected? A handful of people, Charlotte included? A slow, gathering buildup?

Of the three hundred or so students in the auditorium, nearly a third stood from the benches where they’d sat. As a mass, they migrated my way, gathering behind me. Charlotte stood just to my left, staring forward without making eye contact with me.

Since I’d entered the school, I’d been acutely aware of the distinctions, the difference between then and now. The sense of the Undersider’s presence in the school had followed me, nagging at me.

What use were followers if we couldn’t use them?

I heard movement, and glanced over my shoulder to see Charlotte’s friend, Fern, breaking away from the mass of students at the very back of the room. Nineteen out of twenty of them were the clean, pristine, bright-eyed kids who’d left the city when the trouble started. As Fern advanced, eyes to the ground, others broke away from the crowd to join my group. Not many. Ten or twelve. It was still something.

A hundred students and change, a small handful of bugs. I could see Emma, standing on the sidelines, her fists clenched. She was saying something, repeating it over and over, under her breath. I couldn’t spare the bugs to listen in. I wasn’t sure I cared.

“This is reckless,” Defiant said. His voice had a strange tone to it, and it wasn’t just the digital twang that I was hearing at the edges of the words.

“Probably,” I replied, raising my voice enough that it could carry across the room. “But not as much as you’d think. We’re not fighting. I stress, we’re not engaging you.”

“What are you doing, if you’re not fighting us?” Clockblocker asked.

“Defiant and Dragon wanted to use the hostages against me, putting me in a lose-lose situation where I was caught between them and having to hurt people to try to escape. I think I’m turning the tables, now. We’re going to walk out of this school as a group. If you want to stop us, you’re going to have to hurt us, and you aren’t capable of doing that to people any more than I am.”

“Skitter!” Dragon raised her voice.

“Taylor,” I answered her. “I’m just Taylor, for just a little while longer. I suppose I’ll be retiring my civilian name, one way or another, by the end of the night. Fuck you for that, by the way. I won’t forget it.”

“… wasn’t me,” she said, and I doubted even Clockblocker heard her, from where he stood beside her.

“It wasn’t your choice,” I said, “But as long as you choose to follow them, you’re as culpable as they are.”

I hadn’t even finished my sentence when I raised a hand and pointed. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then the group advanced. I waited a few seconds, and then joined them, falling in step.

Clockblocker used his glove, and the fingertips shot out with explosive force, with what looked like gleaming white fishing line stretching between the digits and the glove. The tips punched into a wall. A fence of thin lines, not much different from my spider silk.

Dragon put her hand on the glove, and the tips retracted just as fast. My bugs could hear her speaking. “…’ll hurt … civilians.”

A few members of the group broke away before getting too close to the capes. Others joined in. The group marched forward, reaching the front of the room.

Someone pushed a piece of clothing into my hands. A sweatshirt. I pulled it on and flipped the hood up. I took my glasses off, sliding them into a pocket.

Clockblocker was pressing through the group. He’d used his power, but the press of bodies was actually causing some damage, as people unwittingly pushed others into the frozen individuals. He was fighting to reach me.

“Link elbows,” I said, my voice low, “Surround him. He’s only about as strong as you are.”

It took a second for people to get organized. He passed perilously close to me, but his eyes moved straight past me. A few heartbeats later, the members of the group who had managed to get themselves linked together had him surrounded.

“Everyone to my right, head for the front door. Everyone to my left, to the kitchen. Straight past Defiant.”

The man barred the door. We were only a dozen feet away when he slammed the butt of his spear into the ground. Electricity and hot air ripped through the serving area of the cafeteria, with visible arcs dancing along the edges of sinks and the metal rails meant for the trays at the front.

“Steady forward,” I said. “First ones to reach him, grab him. You don’t need to do anything except hold on. Dogpile him, and he won’t be able to move for fear of hurting you.”

I saw some people hesitating. The group almost lost its forward momentum.

“He might not be a good guy,” I murmured. “But he’s a hero. Trust in that.”

Or is it the other way around? That apology sat oddly with me.

He held his spear out horizontally, barring our path. It was Charlotte that quickened her step, reaching out to fold her arms around the spear and his left hand.

Others soon did the same. He stood tall in his armor, nearly seven feet, and people almost had to climb on top of him to find a place to hold on.

I almost wondered if I’d had a second trigger event, if I was controlling them, the image was so bizarre.

Then I took a better look at them, at how some weren’t listening to me at all, retreating. Others were being far less consistent, showing a wide variety of emotions. Sheila, the girl with the side of her head shaved, was among them. Her face was etched in anger, of all things, as she clung to Defiant.

A hundred students had joined me, and a hundred students had their individual stories. Their sleepless nights, their individual tragedies and moments of terror. That was all this was.

I wasn’t sure if that was a relief or if it was scarier.

Dragon flew over us, her jetpack carrying her into the air, over the crowd. Students were following beneath her, running. One or two leaped onto tables and jumped to try to catch ahold of Dragon’s foot, but she veered easily to one side.

With Defiant occupied, I was free to bring bugs in through the back door, not having to worry about them being bug-zapped to oblivion. I directed them straight into the vents on the jetpack that were sucking in huge quantities of air. One second it was like a vacuum, drawing in air, the next it was clogged. She lost lift, floating to the ground, and deftly batted aside the reaching hands of the students who were getting in her way.

Her jetpack expanded with an almost explosive motion, fanning out to have four times the number of intake vents, four times the number of output charges, and two laser turrets that curved over her shoulders.

There was no way she could pack that much machinery in that much space. Either it was all crammed into her torso, which was impossible, or Armsmaster-Defiant had tweaked it.

She had liftoff, and she was faster.

And I’d already slipped past Defiant, stepping into the kitchen, and into the narrow hallway. She didn’t have room to navigate, with the other students who were crammed into the entryway.

She turned herself around a hundred-and-eighty degrees and flew out the entrance of the cafeteria, heading outside.

Only twenty or so students were with me, now. Dragon was stopping beside Adamant and Sere. Adamant took her hand, and she lifted off, carrying the pair of them.

Still had to deal with three heroes…

And the massive armored suits that the two had ridden in to arrive. Two.

“No,” Defiant said.

“You were supposed to protect us!” a girl shouted. Sheila, the one who’d been angry, who’d brought a weapon to school and had left the school rather than relinquish it.

“I won’t,” he said.

He was talking to someone else. The vents on his mask were open, hot air flowing out. Was he trying to disperse heat so he wouldn’t burn any students?

“It’s still crude,” he said, “… do more harm than good.”

There was a pause.

“…r freedom isn’t worth possibly losing you.”

Defiant, still at the serving area of the cafeteria, moved. With nine students clinging to him, he was glacially slow, careful to a degree that I might have called agonizing, if it weren’t so much to my benefit.

He needed two hands on his spear to remove the panel in the middle of the shaft. I filled it with my bugs, and he shook it, to try to get them loose. When that failed, he disconnected his glove, letting it strike a student that clung to his leg, before falling to the floor.

I tried to use my bugs to bite his hand, but I found it was a smooth texture, not flesh. Metal or plastic, or something combining the two. He found three buttons in the mechanisms inside the spear and typed in a sequence.

Dragon veered toward the ground, depositing the two capes there before staggering forward in four or five rapid footsteps, dispersing the rest of her forward momentum. She fell into a crouching position.

We made our way outside. The armored suit that Defiant had piloted to the school loomed before us, a four legged mechanical dragon perched on the athletics field, replete with panels of knightly armor. This thing… this wasn’t a fight I could win. Simple A.I. or no, Dragon would have shored up any weakness in logic.

It didn’t move.

We walked between its legs on our way to the parking lot. There wasn’t really another route.

Dragon stood, abrupt, and I flinched.

She turned her head our way, but she didn’t pursue, as we walked through the parking lot to the main road. Adamant and Sere were too far away, Kid Win hadn’t been willing to venture outside a second time, after the faceful of bugs I’d given him before.

Stray bugs drew out an arrow, pointing him to his things. No use letting some stupid kid get their hands on it and blow their faces off or something.

I watched Dragon with my swarm, for as long as she was in my range. I was well out of sight by the time she finally moved. The students had released Defiant, and he approached her side.

She extended a hand, and it tremored, the movement stuttering, palsied.

Defiant seized it in his right hand and pulled her close, wrapping his gloveless arm around her shoulders. He set his chin on top of her head.

My escort and I walked as a group until we were three blocks away from the school.

“Stop,” I said.

They did. The remaining members of the group backed away, turning towards me.

What was I even supposed to say? ‘Thank you’ seemed so trite. They were all so different. There was Fern, and a boy who didn’t look like one of the ones who’d stayed in the city. Some looked nervous, others showed no expression at all. There was no response that encapsulated all of them.

I tried to think of something to say, but the harder I tried, the less anything seemed to fit.

“Imp found the bastard who was threatening to do shit to my little sisters,” one guy said. “Tied him to a traffic post. And you work with her, right?”

“You fought the Slaughterhouse Nine.”

“…those bastard ABB guys…”

“Fed…”

“…when Shatterbird…”

“…Mannequin…”

“…Leviathan showed up at the shelter, I heard you were…”

“…Empire…”

A collection of voices, a jumble, to the point that I couldn’t take it all in.

■

I didn’t have a group with me as I walked down Lord street. I turned right, onto familiar territory, my heart heavy.

It wasn’t long before I was close enough. My range was longer, now. Odd. It was supposed to get longer when I felt more trapped, but ‘trapped’ wasn’t the word I would have chosen.

My bugs rose at my command, tracing over the area. It wasn’t so unusual, that there were flies, bumblebees and ants about: the heat of summer, the humidity, the imbalanced ecosystem… Nobody paid them any heed.

A small butterfly found its way into the house. It traced over the glossy smooth armor and helmets of PRT officers, touched the badge on the chest of a police officer.

It touched my dad’s shoulder, moved down his bare arm to his hand. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands.

An officer swatted at the bug, missing. The action drew someone else’s attention.

“It could be her,” the woman in the PRT uniform said.

“Fan out!” someone else ordered.

They spilled out of the house. Orders were shouted, and people climbed into cars, peeling out.

Still at the kitchen table, my dad reached out for the butterfly. I had it settle on his finger. Cliche? Overdramatic? Probably. But I couldn’t bear for my possible last contact with my dad to be through anything ugly.

From the moment Charlotte had sent her text, I’d been bracing myself for the worst case scenario. I’d resolved the situation with Greg, and I’d had just enough time to let my guard down before things started falling apart for real.

A guard stopped me in my tracks before I was three steps out of the office, arresting me mid-stride by setting his hands on my shoulders.

I resisted the urge to fight him. I wasn’t sure I could, without a weapon, my armor or powers, and it threatened to make the situation worse. He peered down at me, but I averted my eyes, staring down at the ground so he couldn’t get a straight look at my face.

“No running, kid,” he said.

He let me go, and I resisted the urge to breathe a sigh of relief.

My thoughts were a mess, a jumble of half-finished thoughts, ten times worse than it had been earlier in the day. Somehow, in the midst of it, I managed to establish a few priorities. Slip out, get rid of evidence, assess the threat, and then address it.

I walked slower. I had the papers I’d removed from the clipboard, and I started tearing them up as soon as the guard had disappeared through the doors of the office.

On a more strategic level, I drew on a share of the handful of bugs in the school to get a sense of my surroundings. I’d be letting people know Skitter was present, if they noticed the odd movements of the flies and ants, but I had good reason to believe someone already knew.

Either the people after me were the good guys, and it didn’t matter if I clued them in, or it was one of my other enemies, and the heroes showing up could be a good thing.

Arcadia High consisted of two longer buildings joined by a third, joining them to form something like a capital ‘H’. The main office, where I was, and all the other administrative and staff-related facilities seemed to be located around the center. The only exits from this immediate area would open into an open space where I would be surrounded by walls lined with windows, all looking down at me. Worse, the doors all had the heavy horizontal bars that suggested they were emergency exits, and an alarm would sound if I used them.

Assuming I had someone after me, I couldn’t afford to put myself in that position.

That left me two options. I could head into the building to my left, which featured four stories of classrooms, the cafeteria and a gymnasium, with a door that led to the student parking lot at the front of the school, or I could head right, into a building that was much the same, though longer, with an auditorium and the front doors of the school in close proximity to one another, and quite a few more classrooms.

I headed for the front door, to my right, depositing the scraps of paper in a trashcan on my way. I moved as fast as I could without drawing undue attention, discreetly placing bugs on all of the guards I could find.

I stopped in my tracks as my bugs made contact with two other individuals. Adamant and Sere were in the company of two guards, moving from the front door to the intersection immediately in front of me.

Making a sharp right, I headed for the stairwell, ducking away before they could advance far enough ahead to get a glimpse of me. I’d worried they were making a beeline straight for me, but they stopped at the junction where the two hallways met. I was already reaching the hallway below. The guidance counselor’s office and staff meeting rooms sat behind floor-to-ceiling windows with the same glass that the exterior windows had: hexagon-shaped cells blending near-seamlessly into one another. Looking straight at it, I couldn’t tell the difference, but the light caught each cell differently if I viewed it at certain angles, making them stand out. Measures against Shatterbird?

Behind one of the windows, I could see two guidance counsellors sitting in a circle with a dozen students. Nobody, not even the guard who was standing on the other side of the glass door, gave me more than a glance.

The exterior windows of the building were all securely closed. The building was cool despite being a greenhouse of sorts, but it made getting my bugs into the building a difficult matter, and that left me with a relatively small swarm. I gauged the number of bugs I could spare, and situated the less mobile bugs on doors and at the points where the walls met the floor or ceiling. I might have preferred a denser collection, to map out my surroundings, but it gave me a sketchy mental picture of how the hallways were laid out.

A small cloud of flies was only now reaching the front office, slipping inside as a student opened the door, navigating between legs and feet to make their way to the principal’s office.

Listening in required conscious thought, but I’d been working on training my brain to follow human speech with the insects’ alien hearing. It was easier, the more I had nearby, but I’d have to make do.

“…fight on my campus…” she spoke into the phone.

I had some information now, for as long as she was on the phone. Not much, and it required me to divert some focus to translating, but it was something.

“…of my students are …ly sensitive … to … them feel unsafe…”

It was an unfamiliar school, and while I had a basic sense of the layout, particularly on the exterior, the interior was something of a hurdle. The hallway I was on ended in short staircases at either end, each of which led up to the main hallways of the larger buildings. I made my way towards the one furthest from Sere and Adamant.

“…if that’s an order… yes… fine…”

The principal hung up the phone, placing it on her desk. She didn’t act right away. I quickened my pace.

The bugs I had on her pant legs informed me that she was swiveling around. I had to think about the layout of her office before it clicked. The computer.

I was at the top of the stairs, the door that led to the parking lot at my left, when the signal went through. Every single guard in the building reacted in the same moment, as did Adamant and Sere. Some withdrew things from their pockets -phones, I could guess-, while others were already kicking into action.

It wasn’t just the guards. The bugs I had on classroom doors informed me of some students slipping out of class. Two students, both boys.

My enemy was the Protectorate, or someone with strong connections in the Protectorate. Nobody else would be able to pull this.

Guards stepped into the building and shut the doors behind them. The heavy, mechanical sound of the doors locking echoed down the hall around me; the doors leading outside were all being sealed shut.

The gate at the front of the school was closed, and a guard was heading for the chain-link barrier at the edge of the parking lot as well.

Could I run? Maybe. Fight my way past the guards? It was possible. I could cloak myself in bugs, use my limited repertoire to disguise myself, to disable and/or distract them while fighting my way outside. Could I get to the end of the parking lot in time? That, too, wasn’t impossible.

All together? With barely a hundred bugs available? I wasn’t so sure. Any fight took time, it involved a risk to myself, and I wasn’t wearing my costume. If any of the guards had a weapon they’d confiscated or if one of the capes in the area caught up with me, I’d be more than screwed.

I didn’t have any bugs on my person. I’d been concerned about a pat-down at the gate, and I didn’t want to have bugs crawling throughout the inside of my pant leg or in my pockets when a guard searched me for weapons. I wasn’t wearing my costume for much the same reason. Stupid of me.

I was stuck.

“May I have your attention please?” Principal Howell’s voice sounded from speakers throughout the school. “The school is now being locked down. For your own safety, please remain in your classrooms. Students not in an assigned classroom should proceed in a calm and orderly fashion to the nearest seating area. Students in the north wing of the school will need to make their way to the auditorium. Students in the south wing should gather in the cafeteria. Remain calm and rest assured: there is no immediate danger.“

The noose was constricting around me. The students would be contained in select areas, and classrooms would be cleared one by one. If the Protectorate was involved, I wasn’t even sure I could find a proper hiding spot. Didn’t Kid Win have some ability to see through walls or detect heat signatures with his goggles?

The two boys had reached a room on the bottom floor, near the gymnasium, and were quickly changing into their costumes. Clockblocker and Kid Win.

What did the good guys know? They’d been alerted that I was in the school. I’d been in the office only minutes ago, and the principal had put my name into the computer. That was probably the catalyst, given how fast things had proceeded in the minutes since. The principal got the phone call, and had ordered the lockdown as a consequence. The fact that she’d warned me, it didn’t jibe with the lockdown: she probably hadn’t wanted to do it.

It struck me that they didn’t know that I was in the school now.

Inside of the building, I was largely defenseless. Outside, I did have my bugs. I doubted I could get out without drawing attention, but I could theoretically get them to call off the lockdown.

My bugs moved from the surrounding blocks and collected near one of the fire doors I’d noted earlier. They formed into a decoy, a rough copy of my general silhouette, covered in bugs, and then began moving toward the school gates.

One of the guards standing by the auditorium saw and shouted for Sere. The white-shrouded hero hurried for the door.

Sere was a long ranged cape, probably capable of killing my swarm with little difficulty. I split my swarm off into further copies, maintaining their movement towards the gate and the walls.

Another announcement was broadcast throughout the school. “A supervillain is currently near the school entrance. Students in the central areas of the school should relocate to the cafeteria. Anyone already in a secure place should please remain where they are.”

The office was emptying, now, and guards were breaking away from their groups to ensure that every student that had been sitting around in the hallways was moving to the appropriate areas. Emma was among the forty or fifty students heading toward the cafeteria, nestled in the midst of the group, while the principal followed at the rear with two guards in her company.

Behind me, the guidance office was evacuating as well. The glass door opened, and the soundproof seal broke. I could hear one of the counselors speaking to the twelve or so teenagers around him. “Let’s go to the cafeteria. If this takes a while, we’ll at least be able to eat.”

He spotted me and gestured for me to join the group.

I could have argued and asked to go to the auditorium instead. There were any number of excuses that could have worked, including ‘I have an issue with one of the students who’s in the cafeteria’.

But I was more interested in being invisible. Better to play along, to think of a plan and execute it, while doing as little as possible to draw attention to myself. Here, at least, I’d be hidden among others. I joined the crowd moving in the direction of the cafeteria.

More guards were directing other students to the cafeteria, the groups merging into a single mass, with the cafeteria doors as the bottleneck. Inside, everyone was spreading out to find tables. Again, I noted the distinction between the two varieties of student. The bright and cheerful ones were collecting together, filling up every space at the tables closest to the door and to the front of the cafeteria, where all of the food was available. Others were spreading out, alone or in groups of two to five.

The principal and other staff members were standing by the door, seeing that everyone filed peacefully into the room. Emma was sitting at one table with all of the secretaries and a few of the teachers who I supposed hadn’t had a class to teach. She glared at me as I walked into the room.

I found Charlotte, too, identifying her by the cube of paper with the ladybug inside that I had my more prominent minions carrying these days.

“Taylor!” she hissed, as I made my way towards a table at the back of the room.

I was dimly aware of Sere striking down one of the decoys. The moisture in the air zipped to his hand, and nearly half of the decoy was ruined, the bugs dazed or unable to move.

The spiders, I noted, suffered worse than most. They used a kind of biological hydraulic system to move. Shit. I liked my spiders. They were particularly useful.

I reached Charlotte and murmured, “Best if you don’t know me.”

“Hey, Taylor,” she hissed the words, twisting around in her seat. When I didn’t reply, she repeated herself, “Hey. Is this about you?”

“I think so,” I muttered.

I took a seat at a table near the back, folding my arms in front of me and resting my chin on the back of my hands. Staying out of sight, while keeping an eye on everything. It also allowed me to focus on my swarm.

My bugs were discreetly tracing back routes and other options. Was there a place where the cafeteria staff unloaded the day’s food? Some back way leading from, say, a gym or custodial entrance? A way onto the roof, even? I didn’t have enough bugs to spare that I could leave them on walls. I was forced to personally memorize every corridor and feature of the building that might be important.

Outside, Sere was working at destroying my decoys. I split off more copies, and then moved one group to him to see if I could blind him.

The bugs were being sucked dry of moisture as they got too close to Sere; I wouldn’t be able to disable him with just my swarm. He drew more water from a cloud of bugs, desiccating and killing hundreds.

The number that died was indicative of something, though. As devastating as the attack was, the effect didn’t cover a massive area. It was a roughly cone-shaped area, with a long reach, but narrow breadth.

If he was surrounded by moisture, maybe I could use that against him? My flying bugs started doing bombing runs. They picked up small stones and dirt, using the fine tarsals that helped them cling to walls. There wasn’t the suction, but it served to allow them to pick up specks at a time. They flew in tight loops, staying high over Sere as they dropped the fragments, touched ground to collect more dirt, and repeated the process. I was careful to spread them out and collect the fragments from multiple places so he couldn’t kill too many at a time.

Dense moisture and dirt could become a thin mud, and it might serve to blind him or distract him where my bugs couldn’t.

In the cafeteria, another group of students was filing inside. Fifty or sixty in all, they each bore telltale signs of the kids who’d stayed. Many were drenched in sweat, and the teacher with them held a basketball. Had they been in the gym, burning off nervous energy, working on building social bonds and all that?

There were maybe three or four hundred people in the cafeteria, now, as students from all over the school streamed in, including most of the ones from the auditorium. With the increasing number of students, it was impossible for anyone to have a table to themselves. A group of three boys claimed the far end of Charlotte’s table, and she stood up.

She had issues around unfamiliar men. It might have served as a push for her to do what she’d been debating doing anyways. She joined me at my table, sitting close enough that our shoulders touched.

“What’s going on?” she whispered.

“You know when Tattletale vetted everybody?” I whispered back.

Charlotte nodded.

“She made a list of names, some vetted people along with some others who were safe. Mixing it up. She gave the list to the principal, with the idea that maybe she could cut us some slack and we’d help keep the peace in the school in exchange. So she had an idea that I was related to the Undersiders, she told me to run and hinted someone might be after me,” I said.

Charlotte nodded again, mute.

“I tried,” I whispered, “but I couldn’t cover enough ground in time. Someone forced her hand and ordered her to put the school on lockdown. I can’t slip out without drawing attention to myself, I’m not in a position to fight, and it’s only a matter of time before they find me.”

“Shit,” she said.

“Exactly,” I said. “I won’t blame you if you want to move somewhere else.”

“I’ll stay,” she said.

“Char-”

“I’ll stay,” she repeated.

I relented. I couldn’t afford to focus on this, when I needed to control my bugs and memorize any possible escape routes or hiding places. “If anything happens, get clear. You don’t know me. Your ‘little brother’ is counting on you, and he should be your priority.”

“Little brother?” she asked. I saw the realization as she remembered our code word. ‘Little brother’ referred to all the kids in her charge.

“Oh. Right,” she said.

Kid Win was making a beeline for the front door. I clustered bugs on the surface of the door, blocking his line of sight as much as I was able.

It didn’t work. The thermal goggles. Which means he can tell there’s no body inside any of the decoys. He pushed the door open and shouted, “Sere!”

That was about as far as he got before my bugs descended on him, filling his open mouth.

“What are you going to do?” Charlotte asked. With the degree of attention that I was devoting to what was going on, she sounded almost distant.

Even with the murmuring of hundreds or so students conversing, the cafeteria was eerily still and quiet compared to what was going on outside. Adamant was standing at the doorway to the auditorium, simultaneously trying to keep an eye on the stray students from the north building and the fighting outside. Clockblocker was making his way to the front. He was slightly different; he wore what seemed to be a gauntlet, out of proportion with the rest of his body.

“I have a few options,” I whispered my response. “I could be aggressive, take on the people at the door. I think I could slip away.”

“Why didn’t you do that already?”

“They were too guarded, and they were anticipating trouble from within the building. My bugs are causing some chaos outside, now, and they’ll have their backs turned. I’ll have time to improvise a mask, which I didn’t, before.”

“You have to get out of the cafeteria first.”

“I’m not too worried about that,” I said. “There’s two or three possible escape routes I’ve been able to find, if I can get my hands on a set of keys or create a big enough distraction to get away with making some noise. The principal has my back, and she might make it easier. I’d ask her for a key, but I’m not sure she would be willing to risk it, and there’s too many people around her.”

Including Emma, I noted. One person I could count on to pay attention to me.

“What if she’s the one who made the call to these people who are after you?”

The principal? I shook my head. “Her priority is keeping this school and its students safe. Besides, I overheard her communicating with someone on the phone. If she was playing both sides, there’d be no reason for her to maintain the ruse when I wasn’t anywhere nearby.”

“Unless she knew you could hear through your bugs,” Charlotte added.

“Unless she knows,” I echoed her. “I don’t think she does.”

Kid Win was suffering at the hands of my swarm. He drew a weapon, but my swarm was already prepared with lengths of silk. They constricted the weapon and prevented it from unfolding. Sere, for his part, had his hands full trying to take down the decoys. A large part of what I was concentrating on was the decoys, getting enough details right, and splitting them off in a way that suggested I could be any of them, while simultaneously keeping them far enough apart that he couldn’t attack more than one at once.

“Taylor,” Charlotte whispered. “If they know who you are, they know. They could find you again, or put your face on the news.”

“If they did, it would be breaking a good few unwritten rules. Especially if they only knew who I was because I helped with the Echidna situation. They can’t afford to punish villains for helping against the big threats. It would mean fewer people showed, and they need all the help they can get. Here, at least, they could say I was intruding on neutral ground.”

The explanation felt feeble.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Charlotte whispered, echoing my line of thinking. “Doing it here, at a school, with so many potential hostages around. Breaking the code?”

“I’m thinking…” I replied, “I’m thinking everyone knows the Protectorate is falling apart. Legend’s gone, Eidolon’s announced he’s leaving as soon as things get quieter, the head of the PRT stepped down, a whole bunch of rank and file members left, and so did Weld and a lot of the more monstrous capes. Maybe there’s pressure from the top to put one in the win column, remind people why the Protectorate exists.”

And who better to take down than the creepy teenage supervillain who’s leading the team that took over a city?

“But in a school?”

I didn’t have any guesses to offer on that count. I focused on the fighting outside instead of responding.

Getting too close to Sere was killing my bugs just as easily as his long ranged absorption attack. I had to attack him from range, and the rain of dirt and small stones wasn’t doing anything, as far as I could tell.

I turned to a tactic that had crossed my mind while fighting Echidna. She, like Sere, had been tricky to get close to. Unlike Sere, she’d been too big to really tie up.

Spiders drew out lines of silk and formed them into cords, weaving them into one another to form extended lines, fifty or so feet long. With the combined efforts of dozens of flying insects, half gripping one end and half gripping the other, the lines were flown in Sere’s direction, so he was caught by the middle.

The bugs holding the ends then continued onward, keeping the cord taut as they circled him, one group flying clockwise, the other flying in the opposite direction. In this manner, they orbited him, winding him up in a single length of cord.

With five cords being wound around him in that fashion, I soon had him hampered, his arms and legs restricted in movement.

He kept moving forward, attacking my decoys. As he passed a signpost, I hurried to have my bugs wind the remaining lengths of cord around it. Lines went taut, cords constricted around him, and he fell. He struggled, but it didn’t seem he would be on his feet anytime soon.

With Kid Win on the ground, thrashing, that was two down.

The other two, I was pretty sure I could deal with them if it came down to it. I wasn’t sure what Clockblocker’s glove did, but I had a suspicion. Adamant’s armor was just begging to have silk cords wind through the chain links and armor plates.

My bugs rifled through Kid Win’s pouches and armor compartments. Masses of bugs and teams of the larger, stronger bugs working to pull silk cords helped to divest him of various tinker tools and components. His smart phone, a cylinder with a trigger on the front and a button on top, a sphere with a hole through the center, with screw-like rifling and electrical connectors in the interior. There were two devices like tuning forks, too, with tines that wound around one another without touching, and wires beneath the handles. Bugs in his ears helped to work an ear bud out of position and carry it off.

Once he was denied as many of his tools as I could move, I dragged them away. It was only when I was sure that he wouldn’t be able to use them against the swarm or against me that I eased up on him. I let my bugs drift in the general direction my decoys had gone, as though I were leaving or gone.

He stood, gagging and choking. Sere wasn’t in sight, and I’d taken Kid Win’s phone. There was only one place for him to go if he wanted to communicate with the others and touch base. He headed back into the school.

I was ready. Bugs flowed out of his pockets, gaps in his armor and from where they’d clustered at the small of his back. I tied his wrist to the door handle.

It took him a long few seconds to realize the door wouldn’t swing shut until he moved. That bought the remainder of my swarm time to turn around and flow through the open entryway. They headed straight for the guards, and swept into their pockets the same way they had with Kid Win’s pouches.

Keys? Yes.

While Kid Win and the guards were blinded, my bugs fetched the keys.

I stood from the bench of the lunch table. “I think I’m set.”

“Just like that?” Charlotte asked.

I looked at the front of the room, where other students were feeling hunger and teenage appetites overcoming their fear of what was going on elsewhere in the school. Only a dozen or so. Maybe they don’t have a steady supply of food where they are, I mused. There were areas of town which weren’t in good shape.

There’re pizza slices, I noted. It was a reminder of how the day wasn’t going as I’d planned.

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” I said. Get out, then see what Tattletale can manage as far as damage control. “Wish me luck. I’ll send you a message and meet you at the lair after school if everything goes according to plan.”

I crossed the cafeteria, heading for the buffet tables and sneezeguard-protected counters with empty trays waiting to be filled by staff. Emma was at her table, I noted, surrounded by secretaries and teachers. I was joined by other hungry students, eager for their free food, and their bodies helped to block me from the sight of both Emma and the staff.

Confidence, I thought. I stepped around the counter and through the doors that led into the kitchen. Confidence made it look like I knew what I was doing; being furtive would only arouse suspicion. My bugs were still carrying the keys, bringing them along an air vent. I’d need to find a way to open a vent cover and retrieve them, but it was among the smallest of the problems I’d face today.

I found a door to the outside. My bugs clustered on the other side, my hand pressing against my own, separated by an inch and a half of door. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure I hadn’t been followed, then started looking for a way into the air conditioning duct.

The smallest of the problems I’d face today.

There was an impact, heavy enough that the lights flickered. Even the bugs I’d gathered on the door were knocked loose, both by the force of the landing and the flying dust and debris.

Right outside the door.

I didn’t need to move my bugs to search out the identity of this antagonist.

A figure strode through the swarm of bugs. He tapped the door with the end of his weapon, and the breath was knocked out of me. Every bug within thirty feet of the door died, including the ones in the air conditioning duct.

I was still reeling as he pushed against the door. It was deadbolted, but the metal of the door’s surface buckled, and it tore free of the frame.

He was wearing armor, forest green and gold, with the stylings of a lizard’s frills or bat wings on the trim, and a faint etching of scales to the green portions. His spear, too, bore a distinctive design, with an etching like a lizard’s skull worked into the heavy spearhead.

He advanced, his spear point leveled at my chest, and I backed up, maintaining a distance between us. To do otherwise would mean letting him drive the weapon into my chest.

On the other side of the campus, another heavy armored suit touched ground, somewhat more gently.

He stopped when we were at the front of the cafeteria. I kept backing up, knowing it was futile. Dragon had exited the other suit, and was using a jetpack to navigate the hallway, flying towards us with an accuracy and ease of movement that belied how fast she was moving.

I didn’t have an escape route. The woman stopped directly behind me, at the entrance to the cafeteria.

“Dragon,” I said. “And Armsmaster.”

“The name is Defiant,” Armsmaster corrected me. His voice had a funny sound to it.

“Skitter,” Dragon answered me, loud enough for everyone to hear. Her voice was almost gentle. “I’m sorry it worked out this way. My hand was forced.”